AGT contestant's journey from living in her car to golden buzzer wows everyone
Charity Lockhart will have quite the story to tell at her 50th birthday party later this year.
The 49-year-old singer, who appeared on 'America's Got Talent' on June 10, went from being stopped by judge Simon Cowell midway through her set to earning a golden buzzer just minutes later.
Now, she has hopes of winning America's largest talent show and, one day, earning herself a Grammy.
And she has quite the story to go along with her ambitious goal.
As is tradition on the show, Lockhart shared her story and reason for auditioning — arguing that, while she loves singing and loves music, she primarily does it for her two kids.
She then joked that she's raising two 'little' children: a 27-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son.
Following a divorce years ago, Lockhart says the trio were forced to live in a car while she performed at clubs and bars to make ends meet.
'All I had was my voice,' she told the audience as her two kids looked on. 'I asked live bands if I can sing with them, and they would give me a little money at the end of the night.'
The family's first big break came when Lockhart won a local singing competition — which she joked was not as big as the stage she was standing on now.
'We won a monetary reward, and that gave us our first apartment,' she said to a crowd of cheers.
According to her website, Lockhart won $1,000 in that competition in Arizona. She went on to create an Aretha Franklin tribute show that she says was approved by the Franklin family.
The show was regularly performed on cruise ships and was 'rated one of the best-received acts on the international waters,' per her website.
Prior to her audition, Cowell encouraged Lockhart by telling her that 'anything is possible' when you have talent. 'So, we are all honestly rooting for you right now. Come on!' he said.
Lockhart's AGT audition starts off on the wrong foot
For her first song, Lockhart sang an a capella of Judy Garland's 'Over the Rainbow.'
Her talent was obvious, but she was cut short after just 30 seconds as Cowell put two hands in the air and asked her to stop.
'I stopped you because I like you, but it just wasn't working for me,' Cowell said to a crowd of boos.
'Have you got another song?' Cowell asked, giving Lockhart a chance at redemption.
For her second song, she performed a version of 'Golden Slumbers' by The Beatles — this time with background music.
'Look, I really want this to work for you. And I know this is a lot of pressure. But come on, you've got it in you. Let's hear the other song,' Cowell said before she started singing.
Sofía Vergara's jaw dropped 30 seconds later, and Cowell's jaw followed.
And that was before she started hitting whistle notes.
Mel B liked it so much that she was the first to stand up and cheer when the song ended — and the entire audience (including Cowell) followed.
'This is what a great audition is all about,' Cowell said. 'You know when people are going to talk about you the following day — that was one of those auditions. It was that good.'
Mel B uses her second golden buzzer of the season
As for Mel B, she had a golden look in her eye the entire performance.
'Oh man, you know what, every once in a while you see somebody, you connect with them and they just bring more and more to the table,' she said.
'I think you're amazing and I want to give you this right now,' she said — pressing the golden buzzer.
The 'golden buzzer' is a button that AGT judges can press when they are so impressed by an act that they want to send them directly to the live shows.
You can watch the golden moment in its entirety below:
It was Mel B's second use of the buzzer this season after sending the Messoudi Brothers straight to the live shows during the second night of auditions.
'Oh, I know instantly,' she told NBC Insider of her golden buzzer sense.
'Both my golden buzzers, I knew. And I'm like, 'Nobody on the desk knows that I'm gonna buzz?' I even went to everybody else to see what they thought. I played it well,' she added, per NBC News.
Live shows begin airing Tuesday, Aug. 19 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi on ‘Beatles '64,' the Fab Four's Influence on Cinema, and David Lynch at Their First U.S. Concert
The Beatles are one of the 20th century's most exhaustively documented bands, from television series like 'The Beatles Anthology' and feature films like Richard Lester's 'A Hard Day's Night' to documentaries by Albert and David Maysles, Ron Howard, and Peter Jackson, among others. One would think there was little left to explore, but the miracle of the Disney+ documentary 'Beatles '64' is that it manages to feel completely fresh and new — largely by giving the viewer the visceral experience of what it was like to experience The Beatles' first visit to America via the recollections of people who were there. One person who vividly remembers what it was like to first hear The Beatles' music is Martin Scorsese, who produced 'Beatles '64' in the hope that it would convey the exuberance that the band's first visit to America inspired. 'You have to understand, it was the end of the origins of rock and roll,' Scorsese told IndieWire. 'You had Motown, you had Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound — which influenced me a great deal in 'Mean Streets' and other films — you had the girl groups and Smokey Robinson and there was still a lot going on, but [rock and roll] needed something fresh. And America needed something fresh too.' More from IndieWire 'In Your Dreams' Teaser: The Search for the Sandman Powers Netflix's New Animated Sibling Fantasy Gold List TV Honors 'Squid Game,' 'Deli Boys,' 'The Studio,' and More That's because the country was, when The Beatles arrived on American shores in February 1964, still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a tragedy that 'Beatles '64' uses as a structuring device in order to give the band's visit context. 'The devastation was unlike anything anyone had experienced in our generation,' Scorsese said. 'The country was ready for something new.' Yet as Scorsese points out, and the documentary demonstrates, The Beatles were initially met with skepticism. 'They were touted as kind of an oddity because they had hair that was long, and the press couldn't wait to attack them,' Scorsese said. 'We didn't take them that seriously. There was an attitude we all had of, 'Yeah, show us.'' Scorsese followed the press coverage of The Beatles' arrival and assumed they were just a 'nonsense novelty' act — until he heard 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' on the radio for the first time while getting ready to go to class at NYU film school. 'I heard the first few beats, and I just stood there. I was late for class,' Scorsese said. 'I listened and I admitted to myself, 'That's really good,' and as soon as I got to NYU I was telling everybody, 'This is not some ripoff — this is for real.' There was something joyous about it, and I don't think we can ever really describe the uplifting effect of not only their musical ability, but the writing and the lyrics. An extraordinary change occurred in the youth of the country after the disaster of the assassination.' Scorsese, frequent producing partner Margaret Bodde, and director David Tedeschi had access to extraordinary archival footage shot by Albert and David Maysles that enabled them to give the audience a sense of the immediate impact The Beatles had. Most of the Maysles' footage has barely been seen since it was shot, partly due to clearance issues and partly because United Artists didn't want the material in general release where it could dilute the appeal of 'A Hard Day's Night.' Thanks to restoration work by Peter Jackson's Park Road Post Production, most of the footage looks and sounds like it was shot yesterday. For Tedeschi, the key to utilizing the Maysles' footage was taking advantage of their talent as interviewers. As great as all the backstage and concert footage of the band itself is, what really conveys the magic of the moment is Tedeschi's use of interviews the Maysles did with the group's fans. 'I was lucky enough to work with Al Maysles on [Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert film] 'Shine a Light,'' Tedeschi told IndieWire. 'Marty hired him to shoot behind-the-scenes stuff. You'd see him disarm whoever he was with.' Tedeschi feels that the Maysles' talent for making interviewees feel at ease is what really makes the footage 'Beatles '64' had to work with special. 'It's not surprising to me that they were able to capture The Beatles,' Tedeschi said. 'What's surprising to me is how a 15-year-old girl on the street who has had no media training is somehow calm and able to project themselves and has great charisma.' Scorsese was able to witness the Maysles at work back in the 1960s when he was at NYU and looking for a job. 'They were making a changeover from black and white to color, and they always used available light,' Scorsese said. 'But you couldn't do that with color at the time, so my job was to hold the lamp. Now, the problem is that they're directing without telling you anything, so you have to anticipate where Al's going with the camera to give him a little bit of light. In a sense, it was an extraordinary master class in visual interpretation, in creating narrative when nothing is staged.' 'Beatles '64' contains not only the Maysles material and other archival footage, but new interviews conducted by Bodde, Scorsese, and Tedeschi with subjects from the two surviving Beatles (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) to fans who saw their first concerts — including director David Lynch in one of his final filmed interviews before he passed away earlier this year. The filmmakers were stunned to learn that, as a young art student, David Lynch attended The Beatles' first ever American concert at the Washington Coliseum — and that he had another connection to the narrative they were telling. 'One thing he said that didn't make the film was pretty fascinating,' Tedeschi said. 'As a Boy Scout, he had been an usher at Kennedy's inauguration. When it came down to it, it was extraordinary how many people were at the New York Carnegie Hall show, at the Washington Coliseum, and in Miami — many people who went on to do great things.' Interviewing McCartney and Starr was a challenge for Scorsese and Tedeschi, who didn't want to repeat old stories — no easy feat with celebrities as extensively interviewed as The Beatles. Luckily, Tedeschi was able to talk with McCartney as the rock and roller was curating a photographic exhibit dedicated to The Beatles in 1964. 'The photographs jogged his memory and created a way to have a conversation more than just an interview,' Tedeschi said. In the case of Starr, the filmmakers got him to open up by going through all of the old clothes he kept from the time. Another way that 'Beatles '64' makes enthusiasm for The Beatles infectious is through the way in which Starr himself seems not to have aged — as he goes through his old clothes and displays his old drum set, he demonstrates a youthful energy not dissimilar from the much younger man we see in the archival footage. In the brief moments Scorsese shares with Starr on camera, he seems to get younger, too — as though he's getting back in touch with that NYU film student who first fell in love with the band. 'It's almost as if you can't quite believe this amount of time has passed,' Scorsese said of his experience interviewing Starr. 'I would have been a different interviewer 30, 40 years ago. But following them and other great artists, from the Stones to Dylan to The Band to Van Morrison, you go along for this whole period of people taking these long artistic journeys, and you change. And somehow you tap into that original excitement about the joy of music, and what that music means as an observation of the life we're leading or trying to lead.' Scorsese and Tedeschi, who have worked together in various capacities for around 20 years now, are still not only passionate about music but energized by the challenge of finding a cinematic language with which to express their feelings. 'The problem is how to say it, in other words, the visual narrative,' Scorsese said, noting that he and Tedeschi are struggling with that very problem right now on their upcoming Robbie Robertson documentary. 'We shot the memorial concert, and Dave is now assembling it,' Scorsese said. 'We're smack in the middle of figuring out what this is. We know it's a concert, but there's got to be something that takes us on a trip, or gives us an experience where we can appreciate more where the music came from and how it affects people today.' According to Tedeschi, the challenge is finding a way to get the feelings he witnessed in the artists at the tribute concert onto the screen in a way that's clear. 'We shot the tribute concert along with the rehearsals, and there were tremendous artists,' Tedeschi said. 'Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Allison Russell…and it's very interesting to see The Band's music and Robbie's music played by different artists, all of whom have been really touched by The Band and affected by it. We're working to take that excitement and the musicality and beauty of that and turn it into something more like a movie.' 'Beatles '64' is currently streaming on Disney+. Best of IndieWire The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme' Nightmare Film Shoots: The 38 Most Grueling Films Ever Made, from 'Deliverance' to 'The Wages of Fear'
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift's Decision Shows Where Loyalty Lies
Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift's Decision Shows Where Loyalty Lies originally appeared on Athlon Sports. Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his girlfriend, 14-time Grammy winner Taylor Swift, had themselves a weekend. With Chiefs mandatory minicamp scheduled to begin on June 10, Kelce took advantage of the free time beforehand. Advertisement The two were spotted in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the wedding of Kelce's cousin, Tanner Corum, who tied the knot with Samantha Peck. Photos of them quickly emerged on social media, sharing smiles with family and others. After the wedding, Kelce headed to Kiawah Island in South Carolina, where he linked up with retired NFL tight end and Fox broadcaster Greg Olsen on Monday. The Chiefs star hit the links and took part in Olsen's fourth annual HEARTest Yard Celebrity Classic golf tournament. Kelce and Swift were invited to another wedding over the weekend, on Saturday in Chicago. It was the wedding of Chicago Bears tight end Cole Kmet, who married his girlfriend, Emily Jarosz. Advertisement On Monday afternoon, @elliestyled shared a recap of Kmet's special day, sharing plenty of photos and videos. In the recap, there was a photo of Kelce and Swift's table card. Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift's table card at Cole Kmet's wedding.@elliestyled/Instagram Kelce and Kmet have built a friendship through football and both being tight ends in the NFL. However, it's clear that Kelce and Swift's loyalty lies with family over friends, as they chose to attend his cousin's wedding instead. It simply would have been too much travel for Kelce to go from Knoxville to Chicago to Kiawah Island all within that short time frame. Kelce's Chiefs and Kmet's Bears won't play each other in the 2025-26 regular season, but they are set to face off in the third and final preseason game. Advertisement That game will be on Aug. 22 in Chicago, with kickoff scheduled for 8:20 p.m. ET. Related: Fan Catches Travis Kelce's Treatment of Taylor Swift Related: Travis Kelce's Producer Turns Heads with Major Statement This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 9, 2025, where it first appeared.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
‘It's Dorothy!' Review: ‘Wizard of Oz' Protagonist Gets a Deep-Dive Cultural Analysis in Wide-Ranging if Overstuffed Appreciation
A favorite nugget of Wizard of Oz lore for many of us is the sublimely funny TV guide blurb written for a 1998 TCM airing of the MGM classic: 'Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.' The inclusion of amusing oddities like that is what pulls It's Dorothy! back whenever it threatens to go from exhaustive to exhausting, from dissection to dissertation. Welcome humor comes also from new discoveries — at least to me — like the bizarrely kitsch spectacle of eliminated contestants on BBC talent search show Over the Rainbow removing their jeweled slippers and handing them to Andrew Lloyd Webber on a throne before being carried off the set on a cutout moon. WTF? The winner — or survivor — of that Brit reality TV horror, Danielle Hope, went on to star in London as Dorothy Gale in Lloyd Webber's 2011 stage musical adapted from the 1939 film that starred Judy Garland and the 1900 children's novel by L. Frank Baum, on which it was based. More from The Hollywood Reporter Harris Yulin, Actor in 'Scarface,' 'Training Day' and 'Ozark,' Dies at 87 LGBTQ Representation in Film Drops to Three-Year Low, Says GLAAD Report 'Surviving Ohio State' Review: HBO's Sexual Abuse Doc Is Thorough and Persuasive, but Lacks a New Smoking Gun Hope is one of five former Dorothys from film, TV and the stage who speak with disarming tenderness about the experience — the ways in which the character intersected with their own lives at the time; their connection to the search for home that was fundamentally a search for herself; and the influence the Kansas farm-girl runaway had on their place in the world. One interviewee notes of actors who have played Dorothy, whether in a school production or a big-budget movie: 'When they put on the slippers, there's some sense of self that gets cracked open that maybe they couldn't see before.' There's almost too much to savor in writer-director-editor Jeffrey McHale's archivally loaded Dorothy-pedia. But it's the emotional transparency of the women personally touched by the character at formative times in their lives that gives the doc its big-hearted infectiousness. I could have listened for hours to the captivating Shanice Shantay — cast as Dorothy in the 2015 NBC special, The Wiz Live! — talk with candor about the highs of that one-and-done performance and the plummet back to real life that followed. Nichelle Lewis, who made her Broadway debut in the 2024 revival of The Wiz, gives a touching account of the way Dorothy's escape into fantasy mirrored her own coping mechanisms when she lost her father at age 9. Lovely input also comes from Fairuza Balk, in an audio interview, looking back on her screen debut at age 11, playing Dorothy in 1985's unofficial sequel, Return to Oz, which explored a much darker side of Baum's fiction series. Despite the film's underwhelmed reception as a 'sad downer,' Balk has fond recollections of people approaching her for years afterwards to praise her performance and share how the film provided an escape from whatever bad things life had thrown at them. Comparable responses have met countless versions of the story in its extraordinarily durable 125-year lifespan, whether on the page, in illustrated editions, cartoons, features, television or musical theater. While the literary property had generated a 1902 Broadway musical and three silent films before Victor Fleming's canonical screen retelling, McHale devotes much of the first half to the MGM movie, particularly in terms of the blurred lines separating Garland from Dorothy. He also makes clever use of clips from across Garland's entire filmography to enhance key points, meaning the actress is as much the core of the film as her most iconic character. Gregory Maguire, author of the revisionist novel on which Wicked was based, says, 'L. Frank Baum gave us a foundational myth for America that I do believe won't die as long as America is a country. Dorothy still has a great deal of energy and power.' A wide range of commentators weigh in on the central theme of yearning for something just out of reach that made generation after generation identify so strongly with Dorothy. She is given no physical description in the novels, allowing readers to imprint themselves onto the character — whether that's young girls at a transitional moment in life or queer communities finding kinship in a character being denied some innate need. The yellow brick road itself is an essential part of the queer narrative. It encapsulates a journey to which many LGBTQ people at any given time can relate, the flight of the outsider away from small-town isolation to the big city in search of an identity. There are conflicting opinions about when 'friend of Dorothy' became a coded term to refer to gay men, just as there are debunked myths built around the close timeline proximity of Garland's death to the Stonewall riots, which marked a turning point for gay rights. But one commentator makes the valid point that it doesn't really matter what's true and what's not when it comes to Dorothy's significance in queer culture. Hilarious commentary from John Waters and Margaret Cho expands on that connection, while Lena Waithe eloquently straddles the queer perspective and that of a Black woman. The latter becomes more central once The Wiz fully enters the conversation, first as a Broadway hit that seemed doomed when it opened but went on to dominate the 1975 Tony Awards, and later in Sidney Lumet's critically reviled 1978 movie adaptation, which nonetheless became a cultural touchstone for multiple generations of Black Americans. Diana Ross, who controversially played Dorothy as an adult in that version, does not participate in the doc, but McHale makes effective use of relevant passages lifted from her audiobook memoir. The Luther Vandross song written for the show, 'Brand New Day,' is an anthem of freedom and liberation contextualized in the Black experience, which plugged into a transitional phase in Ross' career. She credits the movie with giving her strength as a woman and a performer. An uplifting illustration of that is footage of her storied 1983 Central Park concert, which shows her joyfully performing in pouring rain in an orange sequined bodysuit and billowing coat. Gorgeous archival interview clips with the young Stephanie Mills, Broadway's original Dorothy in The Wiz, underline the gulf between audiences' love for her and the unkind barbs of critics at the time. R&B star Ashanti, who played Dorothy first in the 2005 TV movie The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (always fun to see Miss Piggy throwing shade at a female co-star) and four years later in a limited New York run of The Wiz, also makes thoughtful contributions, recalling her first exposure to the Motown-produced Lumet film around age 7, and the huge inspiration she drew from Ross' performance. McHale clearly adores Garland, and there's so much here — both widely known and freshly insightful — that he could easily have made the entire doc about the Judy-Dorothy symbiosis, and the enduring resonance of the MGM star's signature song, 'Over the Rainbow.' Extending his insatiably curious gaze far beyond that brings many illuminating observations — not to mention fabulous clips from both well-known and obscure versions as well as pop-culture nods from Family Guy, The Simpsons, South Park and Dora the Explorer, to name a few — but it also results in some elements feeling shoehorned in for the sake of comprehensiveness. The wrap-up section on Wicked seems almost an afterthought; glimpses of wacky merchandizing and commercial tie-ins are too quick to appreciate; and self-described 'Dorothy Gale enthusiast' Rufus Wainwright deserves more time, both singing 'Over the Rainbow' and addressing the current resurgence in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: 'We really are being pursued again by this dark force that wants us dead and wants to eliminate us and wants to steal our ruby slippers.' Perhaps the most rushed section is an account by Baum's great-granddaughter Gita Dorothy Morena, first of being introduced to the novels as a child, and later, traveling with her mother to different places where the author had lived. A stop in South Dakota, where Baum was editor of a Dakota Territories newspaper, yielded a shocking discovery for Morena. Her great-grandfather had penned an 1890 editorial stating that the only way to ensure the safety of Americans was to continue the wrongs done to the country's Indigenous people for centuries and wipe 'these untamed and untamable creatures' from the face of the earth. Morena and another descendant later returned to South Dakota to issue a formal apology to the Native population. Writer and academic Roxane Gay adds that such discoveries don't mean we can never watch our favorite movie again, but that contemporary audiences can benefit from some foregrounded context: 'That way people know a human being made this art, and human beings make mistakes all the time.' All of this is fascinating stuff, even if the material might seem more suited to a limited series that would allow the many distinct parts more breathing space and a few more song interludes that aren't just fragments (more of Lewis singing 'Home' on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, please). It's more reverential and consequently less playful than McHale's Showgirls reappraisal, You Don't Nomi. But it's smart, analytical and stacked with magical visuals, not least of them the enchanting transition from B&W to color in the Garland film. Now, time for therapy to address my childhood deprivation of the LEGO Wizard of Oz set. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
