by Shania Twain
One rite of passage for anyone from Northern Ontario is getting your tongue stuck to frozen metal. Any Canadian who insists “Never happened to me!” is just too embarrassed to admit that as a child he tempted fate by touching his tongue to the zipper on his ski jacket and then couldn’t pry it loose. It’s a strange and panicky feeling, but if you don’t jerk your head back and have the presence of mind to exhale hot air out your mouth, the metal will thaw just long enough to release you. With a lot of skill and a little bit of luck, you can escape without leaving any flesh behind. Another winter hazard was going outdoors with wet hair on a frigid day; I once heard of someone’s frozen ponytail snapping right off. Unfortunately, around our house, a hair dryer fell into the “luxury item” category, and so my sisters and I had to improvise. We figured out that if we took the vacuum cleaner and attached the hose to the end where the warm air blew out, we’d be able to dry our hair. The only hitch was that the jet of air stank from dog hair, dried bits from indoor accidents, stale food crumbs, and whatever else got sucked up the Electrolux that week. Consequently, our hair smelled accordingly—mostly like old dog poop, though. One alternative was to hang our heads over the heating vents in the floor, but this took much longer. On most mornings, when we were running late for the school bus, the smellier but speedier Electrolux was the better choice.
Sometimes, though, even that option wasn’t available because either the hydro (electricity) had been turned off or the furnace was out of oil. It seemed as if there was always some utility threatening to cut off service if we didn’t pay the overdue bill. My parents tried to make sure that at least one of the two would be functioning at all times, because in the heart of a Canadian winter, you couldn’t manage without electricity and heat.
So, for instance, if my dad knew that we couldn’t afford to get our oil tank refilled, he’d bleed the water pipes so they wouldn’t burst from the cold. This called for us sleeping with our winter clothes on and cocooning ourselves in heavy sleeping bags. In the morning, we’d get up and huddle around the electric stove. It warmed us, cooked breakfast, and heated our socks and boot liners. Warm feet, hot porridge, and dry mitts were good enough for us to get by. Conversely, we’d have to do this when the hydro company turned off the power. Once it got dark, we used flashlights to see around the house. This type of situation typically lasted a day or two and, thankfully, occurred only about once a winter.
If the washing machine broke and we couldn’t afford to have it fixed, doing the laundry became a very labor-intensive chore for a family of seven. As it was, we didn’t have a dryer, and if it was still winter, we had to go to the Laundromat for hours to dry and fold everything. Our mom had relinquished this task—and most everything else involved in running the household, including cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids—so consumed was she by her depression.
If the washer didn’t work, though, we had to wash everything by hand in the bathtub at night, then take it to the Laundromat for drying. Or, if it was summer, we’d hang the clothes outside, so that they’d be dry by the morning, just in time to take them down and hang up the next load. We had the whole process down to the precision of an assembly line, because if we didn’t get it done by the end of the day, the damp clothes that were sitting around waiting to be dried would get all funky smelling and need to be rewashed. Every so often, we’d cram so many clothes onto the line that it would collapse from the weight and fall to the dirt ground, sending us back to the bathtub-slash-washtub to wash everything all over again. I’d spend hours kneeling at the side of the tub, scrubbing clothes against a scrub board or between my knuckles, like a pioneer woman. For that reason, I could relate very well to programs like Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons. None of my friends had to wash laundry by hand, but I kind of accepted it as no big deal. The way I saw it, if the Ingalls family could do it, I could do it.
In the winter, of course, there was no using the clothesline, so my father would drop us girls at the local Laundromat with an average of nine large, black garbage bags bulging with dirty clothes. We’d dump them all out on the floor, separate the loads by color and texture, start up the machines, and wait.
In our boredom, we’d sit out on the front step and play a game we’d invented called Cars. You’d flip a coin to determine who went first, then wait for the next car to drive by, because it “belonged” to that player. We’d cheer whenever one of us inherited a cool red Camaro and crack up anytime a rusty old clunker came puttering down the street.
Whizzing Carrie around in a laundry cart was another fun way to pass the time. I’ll tell you, it spun really well! This game could only be played once we were the only people left in the Laundromat, although with so many clothes to wash and dry, we were inevitably the last ones to leave every time. If we weren’t all finished by the time the guy with the key came by to lock up for the night, we’d throw whatever clothes remained back in the bag and fold them once we got home.
Believe it or not, I remember our weekly evenings in the Laundromat fondly. Even though we were little kids doing adult chores, we learned to make our own fun. We managed.
5
Music Became My Savior
It was while living on Proulx Court that I started writing my first songs. From the age of seven I’d been tapping out melodies on a cheap electric keyboard purchased at a bargain department store, but I picked up the acoustic guitar at eight and finally attempted music and lyrics together. As I explained earlier, I first started writing songs in the backyard on Proulx Court at age ten. One of my first sets of lyrics was a song called “Won’t You Come Out to Play.” It was about a child playing outside, watching her mother watch her from the inside of the house through the window. The child can sense that her mother wants to be outside playing with her, enjoying the air, the play of a child, but doesn’t have the courage to do it, so the child prompts her with “Ma, won’t you come out to play?” This was how I really felt about my own mother, and the song was a literal expression of my true feelings at the time. I felt she spent periods of her life behind the window looking out, wishing she was more confident to come out, but she didn’t have the courage. I also wrote a song called “Just Like the Storybooks,” and it went, “Just like the storybook says, like little girls when they lose their boys, then they cry.” It was all about lost love; sad girls crying with broken hearts.
My parents managed to buy me a microphone and Carrie a snare drum. This cost money we did not have to spare, and my dad was upset at my mother’s insistence on buying us this equipment. Along with my microphone were two Peavey amplifiers: one for the mic and one for plugging in the guitar. Carrie and I sang in harmony while I strummed, and she kept time, tapping on her drum. We were eight and ten years old as a sister duo, and I think my mother had high hopes for us.
Although my dad was reluctant to put any money into our music interest, he was still very enthusiastic about music and our own passion for it. He played guitar a little bit himself and showed me my first chords: A, D, and G. But my main musical mentor was my older cousin Kenny Derasp, my dad’s first cousin. Kenny had blue eyes and was more fair skinned than most on my dad’s side of the family, as he had white blood mixed in on both his mother’s and father’s sides. To me, Kenny was so cool: he was seventeen, played electric guitar, had shoulder-length hair, and was allowed to drink and smoke. I enjoyed hanging with him, as he had an easygoing personality and a quick sense of humor.
Kenny took an interest in my musical ability and taught me more advanced hand positions and major and minor chords. He eventually moved in with us for a time on Proulx Court, as he was having trouble finding work in Timmins and had better luck in the area where we were now living. With Kenny around, the house was always full of live music, and I joined in more openly, hiding less in my room or in the backyard with my music. We’d sit around the living room, singing and strumming to songs by the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Waylon Jennings.
However, when I was twelve, he and Jill left
home together, which created a lot of tension in the house, as Jill was so young to be leaving home at fourteen. I remember my mother being worried sick, and Kenny now talks about how disappointed and angry my dad was with him. I worried about being left alone in the house as the oldest child. Jill and I had always shared the responsibilities of running the house when our mother was depressed in bed for stretches of time, and Kenny was a good mediator between my parents, helping to keep the peace. I was scared to no longer have my older sister around, and heartbroken that Kenny was gone, too. Most of all, I was jealous that they’d escaped the house. Lucky them, I thought.
Part of my childhood performing experience came from adult house parties. These happened a few times a year during holiday times such as Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter, and the odd birthday or funeral gathering—usually at my Twain grandparents’ house. When it was time for the kids to go to bed, my mother would pull out my guitar and ask me to sing. With everyone feeling good, the spirit was fun to be around, and it was musically very relaxed for me, with Kenny often there singing and playing along with me. But as it got later into the night, and the adults got more drunk, things just got too weird for me, the kid. I’d sneak off into the bedroom to join the other kids. The parties got pretty wild sometimes outside of the room where we slept, and we kids would get scared and huddle together, wishing things would just quiet down. This was especially true if a fight broke out, which wasn’t uncommon.
The next morning, once most of the adults had cleared out and the ones remaining were still sound asleep, we would get out a bucket of hot water mixed with Javex and clean up the house. There would be sticky drinks spilled everywhere, cigarette ashes and butts on the floor, half-eaten food between the furniture cushions, and loads of beer bottles and empty glasses to pick up. The bathroom was always the worst because drunk people “miss” a lot, so you can imagine the toilet and the floor—never mind if someone got sick in there, which, of course, did happen. We kids were the morning cleaning crew. It was a bit like cleaning up after a Friday night in a seedy bar. We didn’t like waking up to this mess and just wanted things back in order.
Besides having me sing at house parties, my mother was active in finding me places to play on a regular basis. My childhood career energized my mother and seemed to lift her out of her bouts of depression. During these lows, she had no spark for everyday life, for maintaining the household and taking care of the kids, but when it came to my music, she was a ball of fire. This caused problems because she would blithely spend money that we certainly didn’t have on supporting her ambitions for me to be a successful artist. It became an obsession, in a way. For instance, she’d spend hours and hours on the phone trying to book me gigs, making long-distance calls to hotel managers and booking agents. My mother pushed the limits, especially when it came to spending money on my music.
My poor father, stressed over money issues as it was, would peruse the phone bill, hiked up with long-distance charges, and do a double take at the amount. “We can’t pay this!” he’d shout. The bills were too high for him to pay, so the telephone company would cut off our service until he did. I don’t blame my dad for losing his temper over things like this. My mother acted as if she was addicted to my career; she was certainly aware of the consequences of angering my father and the inevitable cutoff of our phone service, but she still wasn’t able to resist anything to keep my career going, as if her life depended on it. I believe that she did, in fact, live for my music during the times when she felt most defeated by life, on the days when the only reason she got out of bed was to get on the phone to find me places to sing. The only way my dad could stop her from spending on her habit—my career—at the expense of the rest of the family’s welfare was to rip the phone line right out of the wall. Her obsession with my childhood career drove my father nuts. He reminded her often that she had four other kids to raise, and those words made me feel so guilty. I knew he was right, that my mother was spending money on me that took away from the rest of the family. I didn’t want the grocery money, for example, being spent on anything to do with my career, and I wished my mother would stop her nonsense: the wishful thinking that it would pay off someday, that I was going to make it. I wanted her to just be my mom, not my career manager.
One time, my mother took me to see Merle Haggard perform in Sudbury. I’m not sure if her hope was that I’d get to meet him, like that time she got me backstage at a Mickey Gilley and Loretta Lynn concert. She managed to get me on the tour bus and introduced to Mickey Gilley, but I never got to sing for him, even though my mother introduced me as a singer, hoping that’s what would happen. Everyone was very nice and said it was a pleasure to meet me, wished me luck, and that was it. I was not to be discovered that night.
The night my mother took me to the Merle Haggard concert, there was only enough gas in the car to get my dad to work the next morning. Going out for music on a recreational level was something we couldn’t afford, and even when I was out performing, it didn’t always pay. When it did, I’d get maybe a $25 or $50 tip, but I was usually a guest singer, and as my mother saw it, they were giving me a break by giving me the public exposure. Paying gigs required a full weekend commitment from Thursday or Friday night through a Sunday matinee, or the full week. I had to miss school to take those gigs, which I did, but I had to spread those out in order to manage both school and performing. On the particular night my mother managed for me to meet Mickey Gilley, it was not just for a gig in a bar, though. It was a chance to meet a star who might think I was talented and take me under his wing.
The reasonable thing to do the night of the Haggard show would have been to stay home, of course. But my mother decided that we would go anyway because, from her point of view, music was worth almost anything, and she was adamant about never losing an opportunity that brought her closer to her dream of getting me discovered. My mother and I worked out a scheme to escape without being noticed. I went to my room as if I were going to bed for the night. When my dad wasn’t looking, my mother snuck out to the car, and I crawled out my bedroom window at the back of the house, hopped in the car, and off we went. Kenny, who was still living with us at the time, went along with the plan and came with us.
We got home late that night, around two o’clock, to find my dad angrily waiting for us. He grabbed me by the pant leg down at my ankle, swirled me upside down—suspending me in the air with my head dangling just above the floor. I put my hands out to protect myself, thinking about how I’d crash down once he let go. I was also thinking how mad my dad was to be able to hold me with one hand and hit me with the other, but I was small for my age and would have been easy for a man to lift—especially with the added force of the angry adrenaline he had raging through him. I remember Kenny intervening, thankfully; I fell to the floor and ran off to my room. That was the end of it, but I knew very well it could have been much worse if Kenny hadn’t been there.
By the time I was ten, I was giving some of the neighborhood kids guitar lessons for a few bucks here and there. I understood basic theory and enjoyed teaching. I was lucky enough to have had a few lessons at the Sudbury Royal Conservatory of Music, which gave me a firm foundation in understanding how music was really its own, unique written language, with marks and symbols to indicate accent, sound expression, punctuations, and the overall delivery of how the music is intended to be translated through voice or instrument.
Of course, musicians understand all this, but I’m explaining it for those of you who might take for granted how complex and specific music theory is. There is so much detail to the language of music: like how long to hold a note, when to cut it off, and how sharply or gently. Every beat, note, and pause has a precise purpose and is written so. There is no room for improvisation, especially with classical pieces, which are taught to be played exactly according to the written music. Although my heart was driven more by the joy of making things up as I went along—creating, changing, improvising—I appreciated learning more about how music c
an be recorded on paper and be played back by being visually read like a storybook. I was impressed that music could go from black strokes and marks on a page to the sounds of a symphony orchestra. This was a wonder to me. I was fascinated by written music.
It would have taken some convincing from my mother to get my father to pay for these lessons, but it was around paycheck time that she would start on how important it was for me to develop my musical skills, and how was I ever going to make it if I didn’t learn from professionals? She had a whole list of things she’d carry on about as to why it was so necessary. Because my dad also believed in me, although he knew it wasn’t the practical thing to do, he had his own soft spot for my music and gave in to paying for a series of about four or five one-hour sessions. From that point on, I was able to teach myself, with the help of some books, how to read and write music. My skills in this area were very basic, but the knowledge soon proved very useful once I started playing in bars and other venues.
Many of the clubs had house bands. Most of the musicians and backup singers sight-read music, or charts. When I would come in to rehearse for the performance, I’d bring my own chord charts. After all, I played mostly my own songs, which the band members had never heard before. It made it fast and easy for them to learn the songs. Looking back, I can only imagine how funny the musicians must have found it at first for this scrawny little girl to walk onstage and hand them songs she’d written at the age of ten. These were grown men who made a living from touring the live club circuit. But usually they were impressed by my efficiency, that I was so prepared and professional, and so grown up for my age.
