Shania Twain
Eilleen Twain, OC (eye-LEEN) (born Eilleen Regina Edwards on August 28, 1965), known professionally as Shania Twain, is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She has sold over 100 million records, making her the best-selling female artist in country music history and among the best-selling music artists of all time. Her success garnered her several honorific titles including the "Queen of Country Pop"
Raised in Timmins, Ontario, Twain pursued singing and songwriting from a young age before signing with Mercury Nashville Records in the early 1990s. Her self-titled debut studio album saw little commercial success upon release in 1993. After collaborating with producer and later husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange, Twain rose to fame with her second studio album, The Woman in Me (1995), which brought her widespread success. It sold 20 million copies worldwide, spawned widely successful singles such as "Any Man of Mine", and earned her a Grammy Award. Her third studio album, Come On Over (1997), became the best-selling studio album of all time by a female act in any genre and the best-selling country album, selling nearly 40 million copies worldwide. Come On Over produced twelve singles, including "You're Still the One", "From This Moment On" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", and earned Twain four Grammy Awards. Her fourth studio album, Up! (2002), was also certified Diamond in the United States.
In 2004, Twain entered a hiatus, revealing years later that diagnoses with Lyme disease and dysphonia led to a severely weakened singing voice. In 2011, she chronicled her vocal rehabilitation on the OWN miniseries Why Not? with Shania Twain, released her first single in six years, "Today Is Your Day", and published an autobiography, From This Moment On. Twain returned to performing the following year with an exclusive concert residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Shania: Still the One, which ran until 2014. In 2015, she launched the North American Rock This Country Tour, which was billed as her farewell tour. Twain released her first studio album in 15 years in 2017, Now, and embarked on the Shania Now Tour in 2018.
Twain has received five Grammy Awards, 27 BMI Songwriter Awards, stars on Canada's Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and an induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. According to the RIAA she is the only female artist in history to have three (consecutive) albums certified Diamond by the RIAA. and is the sixth best-selling female artist in the United States. Altogether, Twain is ranked as the 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era
Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, on August 28, 1965, to Sharon (née Morrison) and Clarence Edwards. She has two sisters, Jill and Carrie Ann. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother moved to Timmins, Ontario, with her daughters. Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa from the nearby Mattagami First Nation, and they had son Mark together. Jerry adopted the girls and legally changed their surname to Twain. When Mark was a toddler, Jerry and Sharon adopted Jerry's baby nephew Darryl when his mother died. Because of Twain's connection to Jerry, the media have incorrectly reported that she is of Ojibwe descent. When questioned as to why she chose not to publicly acknowledge Edwards as her father for years, Twain stated:
My father (Jerry) went out of his way to raise three daughters that weren't even his. For me to acknowledge another man as my father, a man who was never there for me as a father, who wasn't the one who struggled everyday to put food on our table, would have hurt him terribly. We were a family. Step-father, step-brothers, we never used that vocabulary in our home. To have referred to him as my step-father would have been the worst slap across the face to him.
Shania currently holds a status card and is on the official band membership list of the Temagami First Nation. In 1991, the singer was offered a recording contract in Nashville and applied for immigration status into the United States. At that time, by virtue of her stepfather Jerry Twain being a full-blooded Ojibwe and the rights guaranteed to Native Americans in the Jay Treaty (1795), Shania became legally registered as having 50 percent Native American blood.
Twain has said that as a child she was told by her mother that her biological father was part Cree, a claim his family denies. Her confirmed ancestry includes English, French, and Irish. Through a maternal great-grandmother, she is a descendant of French carpenter Zacharie Cloutier. Her Irish maternal grandmother, Eileen Pearce, emigrated from Newbridge, County Kildare.
Twain has said she had a difficult childhood. Her parents earned little money, and food was often scarce in their household. Twain did not confide her situation to school authorities, fearing they might break up the family. Her mother and stepfather's marriage was stormy at times, and from a young age she witnessed violence between them. Her mother also struggled with bouts of depression. In mid-1979, while Jerry was at work, at Twain's insistence, her mother drove the rest of the family 420 miles (680 km) south to a Toronto homeless shelter for assistance. Sharon returned to Jerry with the children in 1981. In Timmins, Twain started singing at bars at the age of eight to try to help pay her family's bills; she often earned $20 between midnight and 1 a.m. performing for remaining customers after the bar had finished serving alcohol. Although she expressed a dislike for singing in those bars, Twain believes that this was her own kind of performing-arts school on the road. She has said of the ordeal, "My deepest passion was music and it helped. There were moments when I thought, 'I hate this.' I hated going into bars and being with drunks. But I loved the music and so I survived." Twain wrote her first songs at the age of 10, "Is Love a Rose" and "Just Like the Storybooks," which were rhyming fairy tales. She states that the art of creating, of actually writing songs, "was very different from performing them and became progressively important".
At age 13, Twain was invited to perform on the CBC's Tommy Hunter Show. While attending Timmins High and Vocational School, she was also the singer for a local band called Longshot, which covered Top 40 music. In the early 1980s, Twain spent some time working with her father's reforestation business in northern Ontario, which employed some 75 Ojibwe and Cree workers. Although the work was demanding and the pay low, Twain said, "I loved the feeling of being stranded. I'm not afraid of being in my own environment, being physical, working hard. I was very strong, I walked miles and miles every day and carried heavy loads of trees. You can't shampoo, use soap or deodorant, or makeup, nothing with any scent; you have to bathe and rinse your clothes in the lake. It was a very rugged existence, but I was very creative and I would sit alone in the forest with my dog and a guitar and would just write songs.
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