Rolling Stone Excerpt

When you think of it, it is kind of a miracle, Shania Twain in the same league as the Who and Metallica. And it doubtless swelled the hearts of not only the Shania publicity machine but also the Jon Landau management team, which began working with Shania in early 1997 and which also works with Bruce Springsteen and Natalie Merchant. No doubt none of this mattered much to Shania, just as it didn't mean all that much to her to learn, in 1996, that her Woman in Me album had broken a sales record long held by Patsy Cline. "I don't get all that excited," she said. "It's a great thing. But you know what? I don't take a lot of pride in those things, for some reason. It just doesn't mean that much." She kind of snorted and laughed. "My poor manager gets so excited," she continued. "And I'm not a lot of fun. I'm like, 'That's great. Now let's move on.' "

If Shania is unruffled by show-business milestones that would make other performers insufferable, she probably has her reasons. Her father, Jerry, an Ojibwa Indian, and her mother, Sharon, an Irish-Canadian, raised her in a medium-size city in northern Canada, home to some of the largest gold mines in North America, 200 lakes, a year-round view of the sparkling northern lights, temperatures that can reach minus-forty degrees, many, many ice-fishing fanatics, a subpar educational system and more than its share of unemployed.

Indeed, Jerry, a forester and prospector, never had steady work. There were four kids in a house with three bedrooms, and the family was poor. When there was milk around, a rare enough event, it was doled out in exact portions. At school, Shania envied the apples and roast-beef sandwiches of the other kids; she never had too many apples; between her two slices of bread was only mayo or mustard, nothing else. She lived in fear that her teachers would find out that her folks couldn't afford to feed her and she'd be taken away.

That, she said, was her only worry. She didn't care, apparently, that she was sometimes desperately hungry. "I don't look at it as a bad thing at all," she said. "I don't regret my childhood. Learning to make mustard sandwiches was something just to get me through the embarrassment, to help me avoid humiliation." If someone said to her, "That's so sad," she would say, with force, "It's not sad." She loved her mom and dad. She knew that they could very easily have lived a better life if they went on the dole. But her dad was determined to make his way on his own. "It was a pride thing," she said. "I respect him for that, and I don't feel bad for myself, even for a second."

If Shania didn't, however, her mother did. Because she often couldn't feed her kids or even keep them warm or even keep their clothes all washed (hand washed, in the bathtub), she sometimes got into bed and could not get out, she was so depressed.

"Tough times, man," Shania said, rather coolly, looking back at it.

Even so, Jerry and Sharon had their dreams, and their dreams mostly revolved around Shania, who from the age of three could sing with vibrato and had a good enough ear for harmony. She took up the guitar. She wrote her own songs. She was quite something else, and the older she got, the more Sharon thought that this kid could make it big. Shania listened to her parents' favorites: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette; but, as well, to the Mamas and the Papas, the Carpenters, the Supremes and Stevie Wonder, for whom she fervently wanted to be a backup singer. For a poor, shy girl, music was a refuge, her hiding spot. Indeed, she didn't want to be a star. But that's what her mom wanted. At the age of eight, then, Shania played guitar and sang at community centers and at senior-citizen homes and at the bar inside Timmins' Mattagami Hotel, where she'd get up onstage after-hours and carry on bravely, surrounded by cigarette smoke and a whiskey-fume haze.

One person who heard her perform during this time was Mary Bailey, a fellow Canadian, a country singer herself and eventually Shania's first manager. "She was this little girl who got on a stage with a guitar and just blew me away," Bailey recalled.