Claire Ryann Crosby
At the young age of three, Claire Ryann Crosby became a YouTube sensation.
Her father, Dave Crosby—a musician and record producer with a YouTube channel—is the creative force behind their music videos. In an interview with parents.com, he detailed the story behind Claire’s singing:
- Claire learned to talk at a super young age and we noticed really early on that she could carry a pitch. I remember some time after her first birthday, she was slamming her hands on our little keyboard in the living room. She started hitting the same note over and over, and then she began to sing the exact same note. I was sure at that moment that she was going to be able to sing.
- This led to an obsession with Disney songs. It started with Frozen, but we also introduced her to some of the classics: she absolutely fell in love with The Little Mermaid when we showed it to her. We bought “Part of Your World” for her and she would request it whenever we drove around in the car. Pretty soon, she was singing the entire song word for word everywhere.
- One day, I was getting an oil change and while I was paying, [Claire] suddenly burst out into the Little Mermaid song, walking around the waiting area and being so dramatic. It made everyone in the waiting room laugh and people were pulling out their cell phones and recording it. That gave me the idea to put a video on YouTube. A few months later, during Christmas break, we finally made our first video to the song from Little Mermaid.[1]
Claire singing “Part of Your World” from Disney's Little Mermaid went viral in early 2016 with more than 8 million views in about ten weeks. Her father followed that up with Claire singing “Gethsemane” at Easter time. The video shows her walking through a wooded area and is interspersed with scenes from the Latter-day Saint–produced Bible videos.
Her video singing “How Far I’ll Go” from Disney’s Moana, garnered over 10 million views. Claire has appeared on television shows such as The Ellen Show and Steve Harvey. In March 2017 on Harvey’s show, he quipped “Eighty-two million people have watched you. That’s more than my entire 32-year career.”[2] She has performed on NBC’s Little Big Shots. The family will be at CVX Live 2017, a social media convention.
Claire’s parents, Dave and Ashley Crosby, and little brother Carson, live in Seattle, Washington. They are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
