HONKY-TONK HEROINE: A Bandwidth executive's HR leadership style strikes a different tone.

• Author: Warden, Billy
• Position: NC TREND: Leadership

Honky-tonk is known to fuel barroom brawls, boot-stompin' floor dances and risky hookups--but a career in human resources?

"Yes, absolutely," says Rebecca Bottorff with zeal as infectious as a Kitty Wells melody. "Honky-tonk, bluegrass, that kind of music led me to HR."

Not just HR, but an eventful run as chief people officer at Bandwidth, which has grown from 125 "Bandmates" to 1,200 during her 12-year tenure. The communications software company went public in 2017 and is developing a 40-acre corporate campus in Raleigh, which is slated to open next year. It will include a Montessori school, fitness facility and amphitheater.

Earlier this year, Bottorff was named to Bandwidth's board. Only 3% of Fortune 1000 corporate directors have HR backgrounds, CEO David Morken noted at the time.

For all that success, Bottorff remains rooted in the down-to-earth lessons of the Americana classics she grew up with in Ohio's Rust Belt. In the past 10 years, she's gone from being an ardent listener of Americana classics to playing them as a self-taught guitar, banjo, autoharp and ukulele picker.

"Honky-tonk and bluegrass are both grounded in stories of the human condition," she says. "They're about the working man, men in prison, love and families struggling to get by. When I was young, I would imagine those stories--the tough times of those men and women. Often, they had done bad things, but they were also human. And the consequences of a hard life are very real for most people."

Bottorff s family could afford one vacation per year, usually to Dale Hollow Lake on the Kentucky-Tennessee state line, near where most of her extended kin lived. She, her parents, her siblings and a herd of cousins would pile into their blue station wagon with the faux woodgrain plastered on the sides. Bottorff made sure to squeeze into the front seat to focus on her father's eight-track player and the hardscrabble songs of Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe.

Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Home" remains a favorite. The ballad opens this way:

The warden led a prisoner down the hallway to his doom I stood up to say goodbye like all the rest And I heard him tell the warden just before he reached my cell "Let my guitar-playing friend do my request" ... Take me away and turn back the years To a song my momma sang. Sing me back home before I die "It's about how life can be beautiful, yes, but it is also a struggle," says Bottorff, 54. "The person in the song has broken the law, but he also...