Shania Twain, musician

About this episode

Shania Twain is a singer and songwriter and one of only two artists in history to have three consecutive diamond albums. By the time she was eight years old, she had a repertoire of one hundred songs which she would sing in bars. She began to write her own songs at the age of ten. Her mother was convinced that she was going to be a star and took her to perform in smoky clubs. Off stage, all was not well in the family home and Shania grew up in a turbulent household where there was much fighting. When she was thirteen years old, she persuaded her mother to drive Shania and her sisters to Toronto to a women’s shelter. Her parents eventually reunited and then were both killed in a car accident when Shania was twenty-two years old. She then became the guardian of her younger siblings and put her music dreams on hold to look after them. Eventually she got a job in a golf resort singing and came to the attention of a Nashville music executive and was offered a recording contract when she was thirty. She was enjoying a record-breaking global musical career when disaster struck. She was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease which prevented her from singing