Susan Graham was born in Roswell, New Mexico, a town made famous by the Roswell Incident of 1947 in which an alien spacecraft was alleged to have crashed in a field. At age 13, the family moved to the city of Midland in neighboring Texas where her father, a geophysicist, ran a successful oil exploration business.

Athletics and music were very much a part of her growing up. Her mother was quite musical and could play anything on the piano by ear - but it was Broadway and choir and popular music, certainly not the kind she sings today.