Shania Twain ‘Expose’ Made Big Deal Out Of Small Matter

Country music

A recent Canadian newspaper article reporting that superstar Shania Twain has no Native American blood prompted a re-examination of our interview transcripts.

The objective? To see if, as the Canadian Journal seemed to charge, Twain has attempted to make great publicity mileage on Native American ancestry. In this corner, at least, the search came up pretty empty.

Currently the biggest selling artist on the country scene, Twain responded to the charges by saying that her biological father left the family when she was 2 years old and her mother married Ojibwa tribe member Jerry Twain when her daughter was 4 years old, so the daughter was reared to think of Twain as her father and of his heritage as her own.

Despite the initially nasty sound of the story, Twain’s explanation makes sense, particularly after a review of the transcripts. First interviewed in this column mid-1995, when she visited Nashville’s annual week-long Fan Fair celebration, Twain never brought up the subject of her “Indian-ness.”

Finally, in response to a question about her parents’ occupations when she was small, she replied:

“When I was a child, my mother did odd jobs, waitressing, all that kind of stuff, but there were five of us, so she didn’t get to work all the time. …

“Then my father, he worked in the mine, he did all kinds of different things. He worked for the government. He was working Indian affairs because he was North American Indian. He worked in a department there but did not make any money, man. I mean, those were our poorest years, when my father worked for the government. Those were the years that we were really hungry.

“But my father wanted to have a job that meant something. He was tired of being a miner and tired of doing all that kind of stuff, and (he) tried to just move up in the world. … Finally he decided to do his own thing, something he was good at, and that was working in the bush. He was Indian, grew up in the bush, and it worked. They (her parents) pulled themselves out of a very poor situation to something that was comfortable.”

In a question that sounds prescient now but actually was prompted only by the fact that her name is so memorable, the singer was asked if Twain is her actual last name.

“Uh huh,” she answered. “That’s my dad’s name, my family name.”

What does Shania mean? she was asked.

“It means ‘I’m on my way.’ For real. But I never knew that until, like, a year ago. Because so many people started asking me what it meant, and I didn’t know it meant anything. Every name means something, though.

“So I thought, ‘Well, maybe I could ask my grandmother.’ Because my parents were gone (they died in an automobile accident when she was 21), my grandmother being Indian, maybe she would know. She didn’t know: ‘No, it’s just a name.’

“So we had it researched, and it ended up there were two meanings. One was ‘silver,’ which I thought, ‘That’s no fun. Platinum would’ve been OK.’ But the other meaning was, ‘I’m on my way.’ I thought, ‘Oh, I like that.”’

Twain appears to have endured very hard times when her family literally didn’t have enough to eat, and then times when she herself worked with her father’s reforestation crews in the wilderness. Asked where she got the positivism that enabled her to dream large enough to get to where she now is, she said:

“I think hardship helps you to become a survivor, and to be a survivor, you have to have … a certain bit of optimism in your blood … I certainly can’t take credit for the hardship that’s happened in my life. Those things just come to you. It’s not like I said, ‘I’m not quite as positive as I need to be, so could somebody just slap me around a little bit so I can learn some lessons?”’

Asked if her philosophical view might have come “from the Indian side of your heritage,” she said she didn’t know.

“It could,” she added. “People do think very philosophically in that world. They’re very deep thinkers. I’m a deep thinker. But I’m also a very resourceful person. Where there’s a will there’s a way. THAT is a very Indian thing. … My father was very resourceful. I will always find a way to do something.”

A case perhaps can be made for the fact that Twain wasn’t completely forthcoming in this interview, but she can hardly be blamed much for choosing not to remember a father who left her and for regarding as her father a stepfather who brought the family through such tough circumstances.

Jackson sales at 20 million

Fletcher Foster, Arista Records’ vice president of artist development and media marketing, notes that Alan Jackson is now “the fourth best-selling male country artist of all time.”

The Jackson sales total? More than 20 million albums. CMT is planning to air a two-hour special on Jackson in May.

Raybon praises Krauss

Shenandoah lead singer Marty Raybon, recalling how Alison Krauss came to be the band’s award-winning duet partner on “In the Vicinity of the Heart”: The song was suited for a male-female duet and he knew he “wanted Alison Krauss on that track.

“Oh man, did I ever. I had my mind made up. We got word back that she was a fan of ours, which just tickled me to death. She was in the studio in Nashville, so we asked her to do the song with us. I’d been told that she was timid and shy, but she was so witty and professional and pleasant to work with. More than anything, she has the love of music in her heart.