Born on this day in 1961, singer/songwriter Melissa Etheridge grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas. A self-taught musician, she started playing the guitar at eight.

"I grew up in the Midwest," she told the L.A. Times, "where they only played Bob Seger and Springsteen and Mellencamp, that was it."

"That was how I related to my world. When I'd feel like I wanted to get out of the town, I'd play Born to Run. So when I started to sing it myself and say I want to get out of here, that was the music that I made."

She broke into the male-dominated genre of hard rock in 1988 with the self-titled Melissa Etheridge, an album in which her raspy, earthy voice was compared to Janis Joplin. Called the female Rod Stewart, she hit the big time in 1993 with the album Yes I Am.

"Come to my window," she wrote in a remarkable tribute to yearning and passion, "crawl inside, and wait by the light of the moon."

Openly gay and proud of it, she said, "Coming out was a real revelation for me in conquering your fears and finding enormous amounts of strength. There's nothing like owning who you are, saying this is what I am."

With her uplifting eighth album, Lucky (2004), Etheridge has matured as an artist and continued to garner critical acclaim as she celebrated her contentment with life and shared her joy of creating and performing music.

"I love to rock," she explained on her website. "When I'm singing, and I've got people in the audience throwing their head back and their hands up, I want to do that as long as I can."

Celebrate EXACTLY who you are.