Country life might be quiet and peaceful in some places. But it wasn't peaceful, typically, in the Zuthers' farmyard.

Often, people arriving at the farmstead in central North Dakota near Martin would hear hollering, and wonder if someone had been in an accident and was calling for help, or something, Carol Zuther said.

But it was no accident. It was just Sheridan Zuther, the youngest of Carol and Donald Zuther's three children. The one with the strong lungs.

Sheridan spent a lot of her time in the farm's concrete silo - because that's where the best acoustics were. And so hours were spent in there on the straw, with her 4-H goats as an audience, her singing voice reverberating inside, and coming out of the silo's top, Carol Zuther said.

Sheridan planned on becoming a singer when she grew up.

"We'd ask, 'Are you sure you don't want to do anything else?' " Carol Zuther said "After a while, we just gave up."

Sheridan Zuther did it. She's now in her early 30s and - after years of daytime corporate jobs and night-time Minneapolis gigs - has , for the last 21/2 years, been a full-time professional singer. She will perform in Bismarck at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Bismarck's Belle Mehus City Auditorium at a fundraiser for the Bismarck Symphony. She's with the group that made her full-time singing career possible - the Minneapolis-based vocal group, Five By Design.

The group - which snatched her up after hearing her perform at Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in St. Paul, Minn. - performs mainly 1940s through 1960s music: Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and such, and is on the road about 200 days a year with its sets and costumes.

The group performs around the U.S. and Canada with various big bands and with symphony orchestras such as the Baltimore Symphony, which commissioned the group to develop a new show, and the Houston Symphony.

"They do very well here,"said Art Kent, a Houston Symphony spokesman. "They come here twice a year as part of our regular pops series."

Zuther said she has gypsy attitude, " I always wanted to live on the road." But she said full-time singing on the road has taken a personal toll.

"It's a hard life,"Sheridan Zuther said in a recent interview. "You have to have a hard heart."

When she started the full-time gig, she had a long-term relationship with a boyfriend and a house. A couple years into singing on the road, she has no boyfriend and he has the house. She's renting space in a friend's house.

"It didn't work," she said. "It was hard on him."

Carol Zuther doesn't think her daughter will ever have a family besides being a loving aunt to nieces and nephews.

"She doesn't want anyone to stand in the way of her goals," Carol Zuther said.

Sheridan Zuther, who has a vocal performance-opera degree from University of Missouri-Kansas City's Conservatory of Music, was working on her master's in opera when she started gravitating more and more to blues and jazz music on the weekends at Kansas City clubs and churches, performing and watching.

"I really got into black gospel in my first year of college when I was given a solo in a piece called 'Operator' originally performed by Manhattan Transfer - a vocal jazz group that the four founding members of Five By Design listened to closely and emulated …,"she said.

She said it was somewhat intimidating when she sang a gospel solo at a black church. But she said her ability to do it seemed to be confirmed one day when she noticed while singing that black women in the audience who were putting their hands up in their air and yelling "Amen."

"That was like, wow, they know I'm not a hoax …That was just fantastic,"Sheridan Zuther said.

Her opera coach, finding out she was doing gospel gigs, warned her that if he caught her doing anymore, she was out of his studio.

"He felt like I couldn't sing … properly if I was singing that type of music,"she said.

She quit the master's program.

Now, in addition Five by Design, she's developing her own one-woman cabaret act and is exploring writing her own songs.

And she's dealing with life on the road, living in close quarters, sometimes the same hotel rooms, with several other people.

Singers and tech people, about eight in all, typically travel a 600-mile day - most of them in a 15-passenger van, a couple of them in the semi-trailer truck full of costumes and sets.

She knows what her co-performers put up with from her. She's a champion burper.

"I take pride in (my burps)," she said and laughed. "I tell them the burps are relaxing my vocal chords."

She, a self-described obsessive-compulsive when it comes to cleanliness, has to put up with some sloppiness, she said. She said pop cans are brought into the van and the cans will still be there a week later. One group member grates on others' nerves by chewing with the mouth open.

But she said when they get on stage, they have a common purpose, and when she hears the beautiful harmonies and big band sounds, she remembers: "This is it. This is why Ido it."

She said she's classified as an introvert and before being in this group she wouldn't interact with audience members after a show.

But this group is out there post-show, shaking hands, and she's getting used to it and is moved by what she hears. "It's not just about music," Sheridan Zuther said.

Audience members will tell her a song made them cry, or that they once had a dress like she's wearing, or that that the show brought back precious memories.

The vocalists are their own costumers and loading crew, and it's usually about 12:30 a.m. or 1 a.m. before the work is done and they can get get to the hotel. In the morning, they usually hit the road. Often, they don't see much of the town they're visiting, she said.

Carol Zuther said the day Sheridan was born in Minot a nurse told her Sheridan had the most different cry from the other babies, "It's a powerful one,"and the nurse predicted the Zuthers had a singer on their hands.

At home, the only thing that would quiet the crying baby was to put her next to the piano while her older brother and sister practiced. Carol Zuther said the older siblings got extra practice in, were ordered to the piano at times, when she needed a way to make Sheridan hush.

Joe Hegstad, then head of Minot State University's music department, heard Sheridan Zuther sing when she was 9, and told the Zuthers he thought she had potential. The Zuthers started driving her once a week to Minot, 60 miles away, for lessons, for years.

"She had a tremendous work ethic and perseverance to excel, which the great ones always have,"he said.

And a mind of her own.

Sheridan Zuther, at 2 1/2, started taking piano lessons. Soon after, at a piano recital, her teacher reminded her this was a piano recital and no singing. But she sang anyway, Carol Zuther said.

"She can't keep her mouth shut,"Carol Zuther said and laughed.

In Bismarck, performing here, in between Iowa and Calgary Philharmonic gigs, expect the same thing.

Tickets are $20, $25 and $30 for adults and $15 for students.

For more information, call 258-8345.