Keyshia Cole

In the second episode of her B.E.T. reality show The Way It Is, multiplatinum R&B singer Keyshia Cole speaks to a group of teenage foster care residents. Anyone who knows Cole's story knows the speech was not mere lip service, as Cole herself was given up by her own mother when she was two. Adopted by an Oakland family, she discovered who her real mother was by rooting through her adopted parents' mail.

It turns out her mom was a prostitute who abused drugs, and, as for her father, he was rumored to be an Italian man (Cole never knew him; one of her associates later attempted to track him down, but he apparently had already died). From there forward her mother was in and out of her life, but Cole nonetheless maintained a steadfast loyalty to her. "No one could ever tell me anything [bad] about my mother," she said last year on The Tyra Banks Show. "I loved her. She was the most beautifulest woman I had ever met in my whole entire life. I just saw this beauty and this light in her from knowing her as a child. I just didn't understand why she would leave so much. ‘Why are you going away? Why can't you just stay?'"

As a teenager, Cole made the decision to leave Oakland to try to get her break in Los Angeles on the spur of the moment, after finding out her boyfriend had been cheating on her. "I just packed up and got in my car," she said.

A decade later Cole has completed her unlikely journey to become one of the most popular young R&B singer-songwriters in pop music today. She's the heir apparent not just to Mary J. Blige (to whom she's frequently compared) but to trailblazing singers like Aretha Franklin. Though she says she has never employed a vocal coach, she boasts pitch-perfect pipes and has developed an obsessive worldwide fan base.

The 27-year-old Atlanta resident broke out with her 2005 debut, The Way It Is, which went on to sell a million and a half copies largely due to the success of her single "I Should Have Cheated," a girl's lament that she didn't play around like her boyfriend had. Her follow-up album, Just Like You, also sold about a million and a half units and was nominated for a Best Contemporary R&B Album Grammy. Keyshia, her third CD, is due in December.

Despite her success, Cole has been accused of being abrasive, and is often tight-lipped in interviews. But with her name regularly in tabloids and on music gossip sites, it's not surprising that she's uneasy giving all of herself to the press.

It's clear that since she was a young girl Cole has often been the only one looking out for her own interests. As she told Banks: "Only you, yourself are gonna do it. Nobody else."