On season 9 of American Idol, Crystal Bowersox never held back, choosing gritty, give-it-your-all songs like “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Long As I Can See the Light” and “People Get Ready.” She’s no different on her first CD, “Farmer’s Daughter,” although now she’s singing about the abuse she suffered as a child.

As you’d expect from the straightforward, no-nonsense image she presented on Idol, Crystal doesn’t have many poetic images in the title song, which talks about her abusive mother. “You’d come home with bourbon breath…And when you broke my bones I told the school I fell down the stairs.”

“It is a darker song,” she told www.mtv.com. “It’s just blunt and brutally honest…I’m OK with it. When I wrote that song is when all those emotions left me. I don’t carry them around in my heart. I’m back to smiling, happy, bubbly me.”

Well, that last remark may be a bit exaggerated. But what’s true is that Crystal has made an amazing, difficult journey from a small Ohio town to singing on the Chicago subways (and winning a citywide folk-singing contest) to American Idol.

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Her most serious burden has been her Type 1 Diabetes. Crystal was diagnosed at age six, but not before she was given a hard time at school about her symptoms. “I was taking too many bathroom breaks and snack breaks,” she told www.DiabetesMine.com. I was actually punished for it.”

It even affected her appearance on American Idol; one of her competitions was postponed after she was hospitalized because of complications from the illness. At first, the Idol producers wanted to drop her from the show. Ken Warwick, the executive producer of the show, came into the hospital to see me, and he said, with his cute British accent, ‘I’m sorry darling. You’re off the show.’ I thought it was a joke! But he wasn’t laughing. I threw a fit. I literally begged and pleaded, and I cried and said, ‘No way I’ve come this far to let diabetes stop me!’”

Thankfully her son, Tony, who was born in January 2009, shows no signs of the disease. And although Crystal broke up with her boyfriend, Tony Kusian. But just last October, she married a longtime friend, Brian Walker. And another song on Crystal’s CD, Lonely Don’t Come Around Here No More, talks of her joy with her husband and her son.

"I can't believe how incredibly lucky we are to have found so much laughter, love and light within each other,” she said, according to www.radaronline.com. “We're one happy WalkerSox family.”

Another reason for happiness: On the first day of its release, “Farmer’s Daughter” shot to number one on iTunes. (radaronline, mtv, diabetes mine)

Jane Farrell is a senior editor at BettyConfidential.

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