Shania Twain

Shania Twain is a Canadian singer-songwriter whose three-decade music career has produced over 100 million records sold worldwide — making her the bestselling Canadian female artist of all time and one of the bestselling country-music artists in international music history. She was born Eilleen Regina Edwards on August 28, 1965, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, into a working-class Canadian family. Her father Clarence Edwards was a Canadian-Algonquin lumber-business worker, and her mother Sharon Morrison was a homemaker. Her parents divorced when Eilleen was two, after which her mother subsequently married Ojibwe-Canadian forestry-business worker Jerry Twain (whose surname Eilleen took at age four).

Her teenage and early-adulthood Canadian country-music career across 1980–1991 — across multiple Timmins, Ontario-area country-music engagements — preceded her November 1, 1987 sudden vehicular-accident death of her mother and stepfather (when their car was struck by a logging truck on a Ontario highway, when Shania was 22). The 1987 sudden parental loss shaped her early-career biographical narrative — across which she subsequently raised her three younger half-siblings as their primary caregiver.

Her 1991 Mercury Records signing — across which she adopted the Ojibwe-Canadian stage name Shania Twain ("Shania" reportedly meaning "on my way" in the Ojibwe language) — and her subsequent 1993 first commercial album Shania Twain launched her early-career Canadian country-music public profile. The 1993 first commercial album sold over 100,000 American copies and produced her country-music public profile.

Her 1995 second commercial album The Woman in Me — released February 7, 1995 by Mercury Records, produced by her then-husband Mutt Lange — sold over 20 million copies worldwide and produced her mid-1990s country-music commercial breakthrough. The 1995 second commercial album won the 1996 Grammy Award for Best Country Album.

Her 1997 third commercial album Come On Over — released November 4, 1997 by Mercury Records — sold over 40 million copies worldwide and is the bestselling country-music album of all time and the bestselling album by any female artist in international music history. The 1997 third commercial album produced multiple American Billboard Hot 100 top-10 singles — particularly "You're Still the One," "From This Moment On," and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" She married record-producer Mutt Lange in 1993 (divorced 2010); she married Frédéric Thiébaud in 2011.

Her name Shania derives from the Ojibwe-Canadian origin meaning "on my way." Shania has been climbing in American naming since the 1990s.