One of the most famous stage names in all of rock music started off as a mistake. The legend known as Stevie Nicks was actually born Stephanie Lynn Nicks in 1948 in Phoenix, Arizona. She grew up around the country, mainly in Texas and California. She later became known to the world as Stevie Nicks, one-fifth of Fleetwood Mac. In the 1980s, she launched a solo career that included hit singles “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with Tom Petty, “Talk to Me” and “Rooms on Fire.” Find out how she got the name Stevie Nicks below.
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Meaning Behind the Name
There’s a reason Nicks’ stage name isn’t that far off from her birth name. Nicks admits that the name “Stevie” came from the fact that she couldn’t properly pronounce her name “Stephanie” when she was a child. She used to pronounce her name as “tee dee,” which led to her mother calling her “TD Bird.” “Tee dee” ultimately morphed into “Stevie.”
“I was too little to remember why that happened, but they told me that’s what I used to, that’s how I used to say ‘Stephanie,’ and so, it just kinda worked itself into Stevie,” Nicks explained in a 2001 interview with Worcester, Massachusetts, radio station 96.1 WSRS. “I was never called Stephanie. And my Dad named me Stephanie to call me Stephanie, because he loved that name, so somehow whatever fate just twisted it away and I became Stevie.”
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Her passion for songwriting also stemmed from childhood where she’d collect her ideas in a journal, a practice she still employs to this day. “That’s where my songs come from,” she describes of her songwriting process. “I journal on this side of the book, and then I go back and read my journal entry and I go over it and if I think it has any poetic justice going on about it, I’ll go over here and I’ll make it into a poem so that then when I’m writing songs, I go back and look at the journal and I look at these sides and there will be little bits and pieces of poems that become the songs, straight out of the journal. So the songs are never really made up. There’s always kind of a reason that they’re written.”
Known for her signature top hat and whimsical attire, Nicks’ onstage persona is nothing short of ethereal. Couple that with her husky, yet comforting voice, Nicks’ has established herself as one of the greatest living rock stars. Nicks’ debut solo album, Bella Donna, was released in 1981 and topped both the Billboard Hot 100 and Top Rock Albums chart. In April 2023, she released the live album, Bella Donna: Live 1981.
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