VERO BEACH — Like the country song says, it was déjà vu all over again at the Longbranch Saloon last week, when Kurt Stevens, a young singer-songwriter from Vero’s barrier island, sang his heart out in the regional finals of a national country music competition and won first place.
Just as the now-famous Jake Owen had done years earlier, and with Jake’s twin brother Jarrod looking on, Stevens took the stage as the next-to-the-last of nine acts and nailed it.
Like Jake, Stevens is a student at Florida State University; he started his junior year just the day before the contest. He only started his country singing career two years ago, at a bar called Pot Belly’s, just as Jake had more than a decade earlier.
Stevens’ musical training, though, began years earlier. A classical pianist, he was accepted at 14 into West Palm Beach’s highly competitive Dreyfoos School of the Arts. By 15, he was playing 40-page concertos from memory.
Like the Owen twins’ childhood in Vero, Stevens grew up constantly outdoors, surfing, wakeboarding, and fishing for trout and redfish every afternoon after school in the boat he kept tied up behind his canal-front house. That home, though, was not in Vero, but in Boca Raton, in an old neighborhood very much like the one in which his family now lives in Vero’s Central Beach, where they moved two years ago.
“I don’t tell people where I’m from because they don’t really understand that there’s tons of country people in Boca. You just don’t hear about them,” he says. “I had a bunch there, and we all had our mud holes and our bonfire spots. We all did country stuff.”
Kurt is the son of Steve and Michele Ciancio – as a singer, Kurt uses a variant of his middle name, Steven, as his last name because “nobody can spell Ciancio.”
The family moved to Vero because his father, a real estate broker and developer, was working on a long-term project, a senior living facility in Palm Bay, that required him to commute two hours from Boca.
Checking out towns to the north, they discovered Vero and fell in love. “I wish I moved here years ago,” says Kurt.
“I absolutely love it here. If you say vacation, I think Vero,” he says. “When my friends go to Cancun or the Bahamas, I go to Vero. I’m home more than I am in Tallahassee because I come back every chance I get.”
And when he does, he’s usually playing at one of Fort Pierce’s downtown bars, Capt. Hiram’s in Sebastian, or Vero’s Riverside Café.
It was Steve Ciancio who sparked his son’s musical talent as a little boy. “My dad loves music and he has a great ear. I grew up on Southern rock, Johnny Cash and Elvis,” says Kurt. “When I was little, my favorite toy was an Elvis action figure.”
Before he walked or talked, he sang, he says. At 5, his parents bought him a toy guitar and microphone.
He now plays a Gibson Songwriter, purchased with his earnings from a part-time job in a second-hand jewelry store, and one brilliant transaction – he bought a friend’s broken hand-me-down Rolex for $2,000 and doubled his money selling it to his boss at the shop.
“I decided I’d rather have one great guitar than buy ten crappy ones,” he says.
His first keyboard was a hand-me-down – his aunt gave him hers when he was five. When his parents saw how diligently he practiced, they gave him piano lessons for the next 13 years.
His teacher was Harold Brown, Juilliard-trained and renowned in the Boca-Fort Lauderdale area. Kurt soon became his favorite student. “He was sort of a second father to me. He really took me under his wing. I lived nearby so he would just have me walk over to play even when I didn’t have a lesson.”
By middle school, Kurt had to choose between music and baseball – if he wanted to still have time to fish. He chose music, and auditioned for the school of the arts. By then, he was practicing piano three hours a day or more. But going to Dreyfoos, prestigious as it was, required getting up at 5 a.m. to take the Tri-rail train from Deerfield, south of where he lived, then head north to the school, located next to the Kravis Center. That commute, combined with the fact that he felt “like an outcast” among the students there, prompted him to transfer to Boca High.
There, he joined the chorus, though he had some trouble fitting in there, too – not for his likes or dislikes, but because he sang too loud.
”My solo singing wasn’t encouraged,” he says with a laugh. “I would stand out from the whole entire chorus and my teacher would say, ‘Kurt, can you please sing quieter?’ “
That volume serves him well in country music. Stomping his bright red boots at Wednesday’s Country Showdown, a competition now in its 33th year, his throaty voice boomed over his self-taught guitar playing. His twangy, full-throttle classic “Family Tradition” preceded an original song, “Little Black Dress,” that drew cheers from a packed room at Long Branch.
“The trick with country is staying simple and also staying catchy,” he says. “You can dilute things and complicate the lyrics all you want, but it’s the simple songs that people like most.”
A three-judge panel picked by the country radio station WAVE 92.7 proclaimed the winner – if it wasn’t already obvious, with Stevens’ polish, presence and musicianship.
On Sept. 13, Kurt travels to Live Oak for the state competition. If he wins that round, he moves on to nationals with a $100,000 prize at stake.
As for nerves, he rid himself of that constraint years ago at an unimaginably emotional event: At 15, he was asked by his mother’s dearest friend, dying of cancer, to play at her own funeral. Tearfully, Kurt agreed. Just a week later, Kurt played piano and sang John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and the Elton John song, “Candle in the Wind,” with lyrics he and his dad reworked in their friend’s honor.
With more than a thousand people in attendance, Kurt didn’t miss a beat.
“That’s the most nerve-wracking thing you could possibly have to do, and I didn’t mess up a single thing,” he says. “She had told me when she asked me, ‘This is going to be the greatest gift anyone’s ever given you.’ And I didn’t understand what she meant. When it was over, I was crying, but I felt this crazy thing: I knew I would never get nervous again. And she was right: that was the great gift I’ve ever gotten.”
As people came up to thank him afterwards, Kurt gained an insight into the power of music. “That’s when I really fell in love with performing,” he goes on. “I saw how writing a song and playing a song could really make somebody’s day. There are not many professions that you can do something like that for people.”
