Eilleen Regina "Shania" TwainWhy Not? with Shania Twain (OWN, published May 17, 2011, on YouTube)Quote:"I never feel like Shania Twain. I'm Eilleen Twain. And Shania is part of who I am." ( ) (née Edwards; born August 28, 1965) is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She has sold more than 100 million records, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time and the best-selling female artist in country music history. She received several titles including the "Queen of Country Pop". Billboard named her as the leader of the 1990s country pop crossover stars.
Twain grew up in Timmins, Ontario, and from a young age she pursued singing and songwriting before signing with Mercury Nashville Records in the early 1990s. Her self-titled debut studio album was a commercial failure upon release in 1993. After collaborating with producer and husband-to-be Robert John "Mutt" Lange, she rose to fame with her second studio album, The Woman in Me (1995), which brought her widespread success. It sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, spawned eight singles, including "Any Man of Mine" and earned her a Grammy Award. Twain's third studio album, Come On Over (1997), has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling studio album by a female solo artist, the best-selling country album, best-selling album by a Canadian, and one of the best-selling albums of all time. Come On Over produced twelve singles, including "You're Still the One", "From This Moment On", "That Don't Impress Me Much" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" and earned her four Grammy Awards. Her fourth studio album, Up! (2002), spawned eight singles, including "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!", "Ka-Ching!" and "Forever and for Always".
In 2004, after releasing her Greatest Hits album, which produced three singles including "Party for Two", Twain entered a hiatus, stating years later that diagnoses with Lyme disease and dysphonia severely weakened her singing voice. She chronicled her vocal rehabilitation on the OWN miniseries Why Not? with Shania Twain, released her first single in six years in 2011, "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. Twain released her first studio album in 15 years in 2017, Now it reached number one on the US Billboard 200 and several other charts. Her sixth studio album Queen of Me was released in 2023, and she became only the third woman to have top ten albums in the US Billboard 200 in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Twain's seventh studio album, Little Miss Twain, was released in 2026.
Twain has received five Grammy Awards, two World Music Awards, thirty-nine BMI Songwriter Awards, inductions to Canada's Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, as well as the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), she is the only female artist in history to have three consecutive albums receive diamond certifications and is the seventh best-selling female artist in the United States. Altogether Twain is ranked as the 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era. Billboard listed her as the 13th Greatest Music Video Female Solo Artist of all time (42nd overall). According to Billboard Boxscore, she is the highest-grossing female country touring artist with $421.1 million gross from her concert tours.
Early life Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, on August 28, 1965, to Sharon (née Morrison) of Irish descent and railway engineer 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 Ojibwe from the nearby Mattagami First Nation, and they had a son, Mark. 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. Once Twain had begun to accumulate success and awards, her hometown's newspaper, the Timmins Daily Press, published several stories under sensationalistic headlines wherein relatives of her biological father sold personal details about her life to the newspaper, and made accusations of Twain seeking to use Native ancestry as a career-promoting ploy. The Ojibwe community in which she had been raised, however, stated the likely motive for these estranged relatives' stories to be mercenary hopes of benefit from Twain's success; her adoptive father's cousin "spoke on behalf of their family and voiced the feelings of their community" in saying, "we treated her as Native, raised her as Native. We accepted her as part of our family, no questions asked". Roger Ellis, then president of the First Americans in the Arts organisation, who had given Twain an award for Outstanding Musical Achievement, noted their award was given in "good faith" on the basis of Twain's Canadian reserve card, and concluded that "Ms. Twain has not intentionally misrepresented herself and that she has celebrated her Native American heritage without capitalizing at the expense of the Native American community". When questioned as to why she chose not to publicly acknowledge Edwards as her biological father for years, she said:
My father [Jerry Twain] 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 every day 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.
She holds a status card and is on the official band membership list of the Temagami First Nation. In 1991, Twain was offered a recording contract in Nashville and applied for immigration status into the United States. At that time, by virtue of her adoptive father, Jerry Twain, being a full-blooded Ojibwe and the rights guaranteed to indigenous Americans in the Jay Treaty (1795), she became legally registered as having 50 percent indigenous American blood.
Her confirmed ancestry includes Irish and French roots. 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, Shania. From This Moment On, Atria Books, Kindle edition, 2011, p. 2. Her father's half-brother is the Dutch country singer Henk Wijngaard, who has 20 top-40 hits in the Netherlands.
She has said she had a difficult childhood. Her parents earned little money, and food was often scarce in their household. She did not confide her situation to school authorities, fearing they might break up the family. Her adoptive father was abusive, and from a young age she witnessed his violence against her mother. Her mother struggled with bouts of depression.Shania's interview in the January 2005 Reader's Digest. She eventually convinced her mother to take her and the children and run away to a homeless shelter in Toronto; however Sharon returned to Jerry with the children in 1981.
In Timmins, Shania started singing at bars at the age of eight to try to help pay her family's bills; she often earned 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, she believes that this was her own kind of performing-arts school on the road.Shania Twain Interview . Today with Des and Mel. ITV Productions 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." She said that the art of creating, of actually writing songs, "was very different from performing them and became progressively important".
At 13, Twain was invited to perform on the CBC's Tommy Hunter Show. While attending Timmins High and Vocational School, she was the singer for a local band called Longshot, which covered Top 40 music. In the early 1980s she worked with her father's reforestation business in northern Ontario, which employed about 75 Ojibwe and Cree workers. Although the work was demanding and the pay low, she said:
Career 1983–1992: Beginnings
Twain graduated from Timmins High in June 1983 eager to expand her musical horizons. After Longshot's demise she was approached by a cover band led by Diane Chase called Flirt and toured Ontario with them. She took singing lessons from Toronto-based coach Ian Garrett, often cleaning his house as payment. In the autumn of 1984 her talents were noticed by Toronto DJ Stan Campbell who wrote about her in a Country Music News article: "Eilleen possesses a powerful voice with an impressive range. She has the necessary drive, ambition and positive attitude to achieve her goals". Campbell was making an album by Canadian musician (and present-day CKTB radio personality) Tim Denis at the time and she was featured on the backing vocals of the song "Heavy on the Sunshine". Country singer Mary Bailey saw her perform in Sudbury, Ontario, saying "I saw this little girl up on stage with a guitar and it absolutely blew me away. She performed Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Her voice reminded me of Tanya Tucker, it had strength and character, a lot of feeling. She's a star, she deserves an opportunity." Bailey later said "She sang a few songs that she had written, and I thought to myself, this kid is like nineteen years old, where does she get this? This is from a person who's lived sixty years". On November 1, 1987, her mother and adoptive father died in a car accident approximately north of Wawa, Ontario. She moved back to Timmins to take care of her younger siblings and took them all to Huntsville, Ontario, where she supported them by earning money performing at the nearby Deerhurst Resort.
1993–1994: Shania Twain Several years later, when Twain's siblings moved out on their own, she assembled a demo tape of her songs and her Huntsville manager set up a showcase for her to present her material to record executives. She caught the attention of a few labels, including Mercury Nashville Records, who signed her within a few months. During this time, she changed her name to Shania, which was rumoured to be an Ojibwe word which means "on my way". However, her biographer, Robin Eggar, writes: "There is a continuing confusion about what 'Shania' means and if indeed it is an Ojibwe word or phrase at all. There is no mispronounced or misheard phrase in either Ojibwe or Cree that comes close to meaning 'on my way.' Yet the legend of her name continues to be repeated in the media to this day." Cleveland Evans, in the Omaha World-Herald, claimed Eggar was mistaken about there being no Ojibwe phrase that "comes close", and suggested a translation of the Ojibwe words "Ani aya'aa", pronounced "Ah-nih Eye-uh-ah", to be "someone on the way"; he concluded that it is therefore possible that someone with an imperfect knowledge of the Ojibwe language created Shania with the incorrect idea it would mean "she's on the way".