Happy birthday Shania Twain! The legendary Canadian country-pop singer is not only marking a milestone birthday, but adding another checkpoint in her legendary career, which has spanned over four decades. While she officially began making music in the 1980s, and released her debut studio album Shania Twain in 1993, her big break came when she was just a teenager, a 14-year-old invited to perform on one of CBC’s most popular musical programs.
As the story goes, back in 1980, a young Shania, who then went by her birth name of “Eileen Twain,” had been noticed by local scouts and was invited to make her TV debut on The Tommy Hunter Show, a CBC country music program that began in 1965 and ran until 1982. It has also served as a launching pad for artists like Garth Brooks, Gordon Lightfoot, The Judds and Yvonne Murray.
As a teen, Shania still possessed her signature stage presence, but looked quite unrecognizable. The young singer wore her brunette chocolate brown locks down and just above shoulder length, sporting a full face of glam and wearing a dark brown blazer with matching high-waisted pants and a button down. She quickly made an impression with her performance of Tanya Tucker’s “Texas (When I Die).”
© Getty ImagesShania filming the music video for her song “Dance with the One That Brought You”
Shania circa 1993, her debut
After returning home to care for her siblings following her parents’ death at 22, she changed her name to Shania and found a home with Mercury Nashville Records, who signed her within a few months. Her self-titled debut was released in 1993 and gained some traction among North American country circles. It was her subsequent 1995 album The Woman in Me, released in collaboration with future husband Robert “Mutt” Lange, that catapulted her to stardom.
Shania in the music video for “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”
Shania’s career peaks
The “That Don’t Impress Me Much” hitmaker has often looked back on her troubled childhood, growing up in poverty in Ontario with her mother, stepfather and four siblings, and stated that she got her “education” singing in bars, recalling that being put in those uncomfortable situations was ultimately what taught her to be so strong and enterprising.
© Getty ImagesShania performing at the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2003
Her biggest supporter
Her mother was her biggest supporter, as she told The Guardian. “I was her hope, the one who would make it. I think she recognized the dysfunction in our life, and thought that side would be solved somehow along the way. She loved me as a mother as well, but she was very, very passionate about my talent. In terms of economic status, I couldn’t afford to go to a performing arts school – my education was in a bar.”
© Getty ImagesShania holding her Grammy Awards in 1999
Country music icon
“Putting gas in the car to go to a bar for me to sing” even proved to be a source of tension because of their financial status. “That was not very fun for me, as a child, being caught in the middle… I hated it. They wanted success for me, but they just couldn’t afford it. Money is often at the root of domestic violence, which was the case for us.”
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