‘America’s Got Talent” has just begun, but it’s already found its first Internet sensation.
Michael Grimm, a soft-spoken, 30-year-old singer from Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, is shaping up as this year’s “American Susan Boyle” after a soulful rendition of Jann Arden’s “You Don’t Know Me” that left the judges nearly speechless this week.
The video of the performance was picked up by dozens of Web sites, including 100,000 hits on YouTube in less than 48 hours.
But it was Grimm’s personal story that set the reality competition series off to a three-hanky start. A grandmother rescued him and his sister from a childhood in foster care, he told the judges — and she’d lost her home to Hurricane Katrina.
Grimm said he wanted to win so he could get his grandparents out of the trailer home they’d been living in since the storm in 2005.
“When I was younger, my sister and I, we were very poor, on welfare,” Grimm said. “It wasn’t good living conditions for us, so they were going to take us and put us in a home. But my grandmother stopped that.”
Grandparents Laura and Thomas Butters brought the children to live with them in the coastal Mississippi town of Bay St. Louis after their parents split, his grandfather told The Post yesterday.
“We got Mike when he was small,” he said by phone from the trailer he bought after their home was destroyed by Katrina.
“He started playing [music] when he was about 11 years old.”
A year later, Grimm was playing in bars — under the watchful eye of his grandmother, a church pianist — around the swamplands of Southern Mississippi.
“She’d sit there in the bars and watch over me because she loved to listen to me sing, and she thought that was the best way to get my career started,” Grimm told the Las Vegas Sun.
Nowadays, Grimm lives in Las Vegas and plays “in little restaurants and bars, whatever place will take me.”
“Mike’s a pretty good singer and he’s been out running with different [musicians] for several years now,” his grandfather says.
In recent years, Grimm has performed with B.B. King and the Doobie Brothers. Tonight and tomorrow, he’s playing gigs with the Righteous Brothers’ Bill Medley in Branson, Missouri.
“It is really not that important that I win the contest or not,” Grimm told a local reporter. “I just hope it leads to something, so I can raise enough money to help my grandparents move out of their small trailer.”