Eizabeth Cook might be the textbook example of that young girl who dreams of a big-time career as a country music singer and songwriter. Except Cook's story is less fairy tale ending and more hardscrabble reality.

Nashville's no doubt seen plenty of such women, waiting tables by day to make rent and singing in the clubs and bars at night, hoping for that big break. Few, however, have likely turned their back on what was a promising career climbing the corporate ladder with a major accounting firm to follow that dream.

But Cook, born in Wildwood, Fla., the youngest of 11 children, found the allure of guitars and cheatin' songs much more to her liking than SEC filings and adhering to the corporate accounting guidelines set down by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

And, unlike many of her peers, within a relatively short period of time, Cook found a measure of commercial success in Nashville.

Her dream eventually turned into a nightmare, as Cook's relationship with her label, Warner, disintegrated into an acrimonious split.

The story has a much happier beginning, however. After her arrival in Music City to begin a job with the accounting firm PriceWaterhouse, Cook landed a songwriting deal, released a critically acclaimed independent record and was constantly appearing on the Grand Ole Opry.

It only got better - for a while.

Cook landed a recording contract with Atlantic Records and began recording her debut record in the spring of 2001. Then things beyond Cook's control took over.

AOL-Time Warner, which owned Atlantic, began consolidating its music industry operations. That included closing Atlantic's Nashville office.

Cook, along with high-profile label mates John Michael Montgomery and Tracy Lawrence, found themselves bounced to Atlantic's parent, Warner. Her album "Hey Y'all," eventually made its debut in August 2002, but it was too little, too late.

The album foundered and her debut single, "Stupid Things," received little label support that fall. Consequently, radio ignored it, and not surprisingly, Cook and Warner parted ways the next year.

That could've been the end of the story.

Cook, the bright, talented accountant with a passion for country twang and bending notes, could have returned to the corporate treadmill, knowing she'd given it her best. She could have traded in her Wranglers and boots for pressed Vera Wang suits. With her long, flowing blonde hair and sweet Southern drawl, Cook would have held many a pencil pusher in rapt attention during those dreaded boardroom PowerPoint presentations.

Cook, however, wasn't about to turn tail and think of what could have been. Much of the anguish of her divorce from Music Row was turned into song for her new album on Hog Country Records, "This Side of the Moon," released nationally in May after having a soft release last August. Cook also met and ultimately married punker-cum-country singer and songwriter Tim Carroll.

Consider too, Cook's life has been wrapped up in music since she was a little kid. At the age of four, Cook was performing in the family band. Her mom, Joyce, picked mandolin and guitar and her father, Thomas - who, as the story's told, honed his skills in a prison band while doing time for running moonshine - played bass. By the time she was nine, little Elizabeth had her own band and released her first single to a fair amount of regional success as a teen. But it wasn't all music for her.

School was a priority. After all, she was a good student.

"My parents didn't encourage me to go to school," says Cook in a phone interview from her home in Nashville shortly before hitting the road for Michigan, where she was opening a series of shows for '80s country singer Ronnie McDowell. "They had no money. I was hard-headed, and that was the direc tion I seemed to go."

Cook attended Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, earning a double major in accounting and computer information systems. That's some pretty highbrow stuff for a singer and songwriter.

"Part of me likes tedious tasks," said Cook, noting a particular affinity for calculus. "But sometimes I don't like a lot of structure."

Cook noted it wasn't all work and no play at Georgia Southern. She also took in many of her school's social aspects.

"I had a good time in school," says Cook, who earned her degrees in 1996. "I finished with a 3.5 GPA. I did what I had to do, but I had a lot of fun too."

Cook says she fell back on music to help stay afloat. - and to maintain her sanity.

"Music was more of a side thing," she said. "When I graduated high school, I didn't know what to do next. I'd been to Nashville, but I decided to go to school."

"I would find these roughneck backwoods bands, a slice and dice thing. I wasn't so much into the hippie jam thing."

As graduation neared, she received an offer from Big 4 accounting firm Ernst & Young. She also sent resumes to firms in nearby Atlanta and Nashville - "I was hoping for Nashville" - and got an offer from PriceWaterhouse's Nashville office.

"Part of it was knowing I could feed myself," she says. "I'm not a trust fund baby. There was no recipe; I didn't say, 'I'm going to be a performer.'"

Cook landed in Nashville about a month before her job started and hit as many clubs as she could.

"Here's this 100-pound blonde girl traipsing all over Nashville," she recalls.

But once work started, music took a back seat, she says.

"PriceWaterhouse worked me to death," she says. "They sent me all over the country."

The gigs were few and far between, she says. Yet, there was a chance meeting that put music back up front for her.

"An executive with (music publisher) ASCAP heard me," she says. "He had me meet with the publishers. So we met, and I was offered a publishing deal. I was tired of the workload at my job, so I quit and took the publishing deal."

Most parents, when told their daughter's leaving her successful career track for a shot at a country music singer and songwriter, would probably gently - okay, beg her - to reconsider.

Not so with the Cooks.

"My folks were really excited," Cook says. "They always believed in me, and they knew I was serious about it. I still had money. At that point, I wasn't a waitress to make ends meet. That came later."

Over the course of the next couple of years, Cook witnessed first-hand the good, bad and ugly of Nashville. Like the corporate treadmill she once rode, Cook said she's happy to be off Nashville's fast track - for now.

"It makes sense where I am now," she says. "The major label wants to shoot you to the top. They wanted me to be a superstar. They wanted me to buy into it."

"But there was no learning curve, no hard gigs, no easy gigs. Warner Brothers got my contract and made me make a record. You can waste a lot of years. They don't send you out on the road with a band like Emmylou (Harris). I got a job offer, but I never went to work. We left a lot of money on the table."

With a new 13-song independent record and a better perspective on the music business, Cook is looking forward to what lies ahead.

"This is much more grass-roots, more real to me," she says "I have a better chance of building something. It's another step to building a career. I have another (record) project this winter. I'm pretty driven. It keeps me trying."

Like a lover still recovering from a breakup, Cook recalls the last months of her deal with Warner.

"It was heartbreaking," she says simply. "The last phone call with Warner Brothers, I asked to be released from my contract. Then I got a call from my producer who asked me not to leave. It was a period of extreme frustration."

The subsequent months yielded songs that, upon casual listen, deal with the separation of lovers. Cook said they directly involve the dissolution of her relationship with her record label.

" Hard-Hearted' is about Warner Brothers," she says. "So is 'Here's to You.' It sounds like songs about heartbreak. It's about my divorce with Music Row.

"I write to heal myself. When an artist writes, they usually write from personal experience. I think many mainstream artists are disconnected from what they perform."

Cook said she's focused on being a performer, temporarily setting aside the songwriter in her. But that will likely resurface soon, she said.

"Right now it's the performing part," she says. "But I've got books with a lot of ideas. This fall when I pull back, I'll be reclusing, looking at my ideas and inspirations."

Cook was vague about her project this winter, saying she couldn't talk much about it. Is there another major label deal in the offing?

"I've got a lot of lines in the water; I can't really say."

Such a project could put a crimp in her writing plans, however, which she said comes in spurts.

"I take a few days; it's a real creative time and gives me a lot of peace of mind," she says. "I like to make sure I don't have a lot of other business going on; sometimes I'll go out to my parents' farm."

Cook on May 13 celebrated her second anniversary with Carroll, who has received a measure of recognition among the Nashville songwriting community. One of his songs in particular, "If I Could," has been covered by the likes of John Prine and Asleep at the Wheel.

"I needed a guitar player a couple years ago, and Tim had been out on the road with Sonny Burgess," Cook says of her husband. "He came and did the tour with me. He's on the road with me now. Our shows are just me and him. We're a country duet."

And how are the harmonies?

"Our voices sing together," she said. "We'll do 'Jackson' or some other country duet. I think we sound good."

Cook said she generally likes the trend these days in songwriting, with the more traditional Gretchen Wilson country sound vs. the pop music that filters in and out, depending on what - or who - is hot at the moment.

"As I was making my first independent record in 1998, my music was very country, while everyone else was more pop, Diane Warren sound," she says of the noted songwriter, who's penned such hits as Trisha Yearwood's "How Do I Live" and Sara Evans' "I Could not Ask for More," among dozens of other pop and country hits.

"I've always gone against the grain," she says. "I think country music has to get its identity back."