'Voice' veteran will sing anthem at Jacksonville Jaguars' home opener against the Chiefs

Madison Hughes has sung before big crowds before, but those people were on the other side of a TV screen. Sunday afternoon, they’ll be right there in front of her.

Hughes, who grew up in Ponte Vedra and now splits time between Jacksonville and Nashville, will sing the National Anthem before Sunday’s Jaguars home opener at EverBank Stadium, followed by a post-game show down the street at Underbelly.

She’s a veteran of TV’s “The Voice,” where she was chosen for Blake Shelton’s team after performing Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” That experience taught her to deal with high-pressure situations, but singing live before 70,000 people is a whole new level of pressure.

To get used to the idea of singing in a stadium, Hughes performed the anthem for a Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp game last month. That at least gave her a feel for wearing in-ear monitors — something she’d never done before — and dealing with the delay between her voice coming from her mouth and coming from the stadium’s speakers.

“I was nervous for that one,” Hughes said of singing at the Shrimp game. “It doesn’t matter if it’s minor league, it’s still a big deal.”

The anthem puts a lot of pressure on a singer. It’s not an easy song to sing — that “land of the free and the home of the brave” line has tripped up more than one performer. “If you hit the wrong starting note in the beginning, you’re doomed,” Hughes said.

The anthem also has to be timed carefully because that military flyover is going to buzz the stadium in 90 seconds, whether she’s finished singing or not. The performance might also be televised; that’s up to the network covering the game.

She’ll follow up the anthem performance with a post-game show at the downtown nightclub Underbelly. That comes with its own pressures. She's never played at the venue and she’ll be performing with a band that was put together by Jacksonville guitarist Chris Underdal for the occasion, a group she’s only rehearsed with a couple of times. She’s usually a solo performer, so fronting a band will be a whole new experience, she said. But she’s been out posting flyers for the show all around town for the last couple of weeks to drum up support. Tickets are $15.

She said she’ll play mostly original songs at Underbelly. She started writing songs in the last year or so because she’s seen what happens to good musicians in Nashville if they don’t generate original music. “I did not just want to be a cover song artist on Broadway my whole life,” she said.

Underdal said the band has worked up nine of Hughes' songs and things are going well enough that they might play together beyond Sunday. "The rehearsals have gone really well," he said. "Right now we’re looking at going up to Charlotte and Atlanta, maybe down to St. Pete. The chemistry has been really good."

You’d think that having “The Voice” on your resume would open a lot of doors in a music city like Nashville, but that’s not necessarily the case, she said. Just about everyone who does well on the show moves to Nashville, she said, so venues and producers aren’t really impressed. What the experience really did was give her confidence that she’s good enough to make it in music if she’s willing to put in the work. "It’s a blind audition with no gatekeepers,” she said. “It’s all based on talent, not who you know.”

If you think you're good enough to sing the National Anthem at a Jaguars game, you can audition online by sending a 90-second a capella video to the team. All of the slots for this season are booked, but Devin McDuffie, senior manager of events and entertainment for the Jaguars, said performers sometimes back out, so the team is still accepting auditions.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Country singer Madison Hughes to perform anthem at Jaguars' opener