Crystal Bowersox began with a dive

What makes an American Idol most? A great story? A great talent?

To understand the phenomenon that is Crystal Bowersox, to trace the roots of the 24-year-old Midwestern singer -- from microscopic rural patches of northwest Ohio to Chicago train platforms, where she busked for tips, to the glare of "American Idol," where she now stands a real shot at winning -- to assemble the pieces that come together in a bluesy growl that transcends pop novelty altogether, to understand why a small-town bar musician with few prospects has most of the depressed area of Toledo, Ohio, rallying around her: Begin at Papa's Tavern.

Papa's is on the East Side, on the side that looks like the Toledo that people who are not from Toledo imagine Toledo looks like. Papa's rests in the center of a blue-collar neighborhood, within a row of squat houses, a 70-year-old bar so tucked away that people who have lived there all their lives have never heard of it.

Bowersox started there.

Papa's is a place so unchanged that a chunk of cardboard pulled from a beer case and signed by dozens of returning Vietnam vets in the 1970s still hangs on a pillar. It's a place so unchanged that the lovely caramel-candy color of its tin ceiling is actually decades of accumulated nicotine -- so thick that the bar once brought in folks to scrub it off, but everyone gave up after a few hours. It's a place so unchanged that on a Tuesday afternoon every stool at the bar is occupied and nearly everyone is smoking, the state ban on cigarettes in bars more of a quaint suggestion than a law.

It's the kind of place where, to borrow a phrase from Bowersox, one doesn't apologize for being human.

'Taco Night is big'

"Listen, I'll tell you, I am not big on change," he says. "I don't mind putting in a new toilet, and I don't mind replacing the CDs in the jukebox every now and then. But that's it. I wanted her in here every week, so I said, 'Crystal, I don't have much to offer, but I can give you Wednesday nights, and that is Taco Night, and Taco Night is big.'"

The stage is small. It's big enough for a singer and not much else. Stretched across its wood floor is a rug that hasn't seen shampoo in years. Stahl gave Bowersox an old lamp a while ago. She built a microphone stand from it.

Papa's is for regulars. Many live within stumbling distance. There's Chuck Rat. And there's Coop. There's Catfish, who comes in and cues up "Goodnight, Saigon" on the jukebox once a week. And there's the elderly man who comes in with his oxygen tank and plastic tubes up his nose and drinks until his wife arrives in her pickup truck and Tim has to carry him out of the bar.

When Simon Cowell says with affection that he looks at Bowersox and sees a street musician still playing for change, he's seeing the paycheck-to-paycheck tenacity found in a place like Papa's.

Bowersox first performed there at around 14. Ron Rasberry, a local singer/songwriter who plays Papa's on Tuesdays, says he met her at an open-mike night in nearby Genoa. He suggested to her mother that she come to Papa's and grab some stage time between acts.

Rallying around Bowersox

She's also been a shot in the arm around the city, Rasberry adds: "Toledo, if I may say so, is in the toilet right now. Tumbleweeds are pretty much rolling through downtown these days. We could use an uplift, and Crystal is it."

The unemployment rate in Lucas County, which contains Toledo, is 13 percent, a couple of points higher than the state average. In nearby Ottawa County, where Bowersox grew up, unemployment is more than 19 percent. Bowersox is not the only famous person to come out of this area: There's Danny Thomas, Jamie Farr and fellow "American Idol" contestant Katie Holmes.

But if people in Toldeo feel closer to Bowersox than, say, Holmes, that's because "she's done it the hard way," says Craig Coolidge, who works at Guitar Center in nearby Holland, "and Katie Holmes went to private schools, and she doesn't feel like part of Toledo."

It's an area with class resentment but not much guile. The other day, Stahl says, eager to get his bar on the map but not eager to seem greedy, he quietly looked into how much it would cost to hire Carrie Underwood to play Papa's. He decided he'll stick to local talent.