Who Says a Saint Lucian Beauty Queen Can’t Sing Country?

When Tayla St Rose stepped onto the stage at the Miss Saint Lucia/USA Independence pageant in Brooklyn in February, the audience roared for “Miss Babonneau”. But the 27-year-old singer-songwriter, crowned the night’s winner, was already dreaming of another spotlight: her debut country album, set to drop this September.

For Tayla, the genre isn’t just a creative choice; it’s a bridge between her island roots and her life in the US.

“Living in the US as a black woman, people are like, ‘You make country music?’ and they are very confused. And then I have to explain to them that being Saint Lucian, country has been in my ear my whole life, and that’s what I love,” she told St Lucia Times.

The pageant, which celebrates Saint Lucian heritage in the diaspora, featured five contestants representing their ancestral communities. Tayla, embodying Babonneau, charmed judges with her poise, but her journey to the crown was anything but smooth.

On the morning of the pageant, the doubts, which had caused her to decline previous invitations to enter, returned.

“My heart hurt; like it was beating out of my chest,” she recalled. “I felt so scared. You feel like something is going to take over you, and it would have been very easy for me to say I can’t do it and pull out based on how I felt. However, I just prayed, my chaperone had her prayer group praying for me and I was able to pull through.”

Technical glitches during the event also tested her composure, but the crowd’s chants of her name reaffirmed her purpose.

“Hearing the audience shout ‘Miss Babonneau’ when asked who would win was a really overwhelming thing to experience,” Tayla said. “It meant that they came here with their favourite in mind and by the end, they believed in me.”

Her connection to Saint Lucia runs deep. Childhood summers were spent “playing by the river, running up and down the hills and just enjoying the surroundings and nature, being outdoors, cooking breadfruit on wood and not coming home till it was dark”.

Raised by a songwriter mother and a stepfather in a band, she penned her first song as a child. “Growing up, I would learn all [my mother’s] songs while we were doing chores and I was like, ‘I want to write songs too’. So, I wrote my first song when I was about six years old,” Tayla said.

Her upcoming album, years in the making, revisits older lyrics with a fresh perspective. “I think there’s a lot of power in them and things that people can learn from.”

The pageant reignited her self-belief: “I thought I was no longer destined for the stage, I thought I was meant for the background, but this gave me that push to say you can still do it.”

But for Tayla, the title is a platform for more. Recently, she distributed hampers with a local MP and volunteered at a youth camp, aligning with her passion for community uplift.

Post-album release, she plans to return to Saint Lucia for performances and service projects. “I am very passionate about service, so I am in Saint Lucia assessing where some of the needs are and reintroducing myself to the community.”