Shania Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, daughter of Clarence and Sharon Edwards. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother then moved to Timmins,Ontario with Eilleen and her sisters Jill and Carrie Ann. Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa, and they had two more children, Mark and Darryl. Jerry adopted the girls, legally changing their last name to Twain. Because of her connection to her stepfather, in the past, people had presumed Twain’s ancestry was Ojibwa, but she stated in an interview that her biological father was part Cree. As well, though her mother she is a descendant of Zacharie Cloutier. Her maternal grandmother, Eileen Pearce, emigrated from Newbridge, Kildare, Ireland.
Eilleen Twain had a hard childhood in Timmins. Her parents earned little and there was often a shortage of food in the household. Eilleen did not confide her situation to school authorities, fearing they might break up the family. In the remote, rugged community, she learned to hunt and to chop wood. At one point, while Jerry was at work, her mother drove the rest of the family 425 miles (684 km) south to a Toronto homeless shelter for assistance. Back in Timmins, Twain started singing at bars at the age of eight to try to make ends meet, often earning twenty dollars between midnight and one in the morning performing for remaining customers after the bar had finished serving. 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”.[9] Twain wrote her first songs at the age of ten, Is Love a Rose and Just Like the Storybooks which were fairy tales in rhyme.[10] She states that the art of creating, of actually writing songs, “was very different from performing them and became progressively important”.
In the early 1980s, Twain spent some time working with her father’s reforestation business in northern Ontario, a business that 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”.
She rose to fame in the mid 1990s with her album The Woman in Me (1995), and achieved worldwide success with her 1997 album Come On Over, which became the best-selling album of all time by a female musician in any genre, and the best-selling country album of all time. It has sold over 40 million copies worldwide and is the 9th best-selling album in the U.S.. Her 4th album, titled Up! was released late 2002. To date it has sold 16 million copies worldwide.
A five-time Grammy Award winner, Twain has also achieved major success as a songwriter, winning 27 BMI Songwriter awards. Twain is one of the first country artists to achieve major crossover success in pop music. She is the only female musician to have three albums certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America and is also the second best-selling artist in Canada, behind fellow Canadian Céline Dion, with three of her studio albums being certified double diamond by the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Twain has sold over 76 million albums worldwide, including 49 million in the U.S. She is ranked as the 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era, with approximately 34 million in sales through April 2008. She was also ranked the 72nd Artist of the 2000–10 decade by Billboard. Most recently, Twain will have her own series, Why Not?
