A Toronto shelter before country music's summit

Shania Twain moved to Toronto in the summer she turned 14. She arrived with her mother and her three younger siblings, who were leaving an abusive father. In a Toronto Life interview, Twain recalls that the move to the big city was not glamorous: the family first stayed in a shelter in the downtown area. She remembers Honest Ed's, a discount store, as the only store she knew for a while. The article does not say how long they stayed in the shelter.

The family later moved into a townhouse on John Garland Boulevard in the Jamestown neighbourhood of north Etobicoke. Her mother worked in the kitchen at the Conception Bay Club, a venue on Queen Street, and Twain sang there on weekends. She has described the settling-in as a real integration process that also gave her great exposure, and she says she embraced how diverse and new everything was.

As she grew older, she worked at two McDonald's restaurants and at a jeans store in the Eaton Centre. She also took a data-entry course at a community college so that she would have a backup career. Music remained the goal. She sang sporadically with all-male bands, sent demos to the producer David Foster and to managers, and got no reply. The city's bars, she says, were her performance education, where she learned to manage a crowd and to be consistent.

A friend, the manager Mary Bailey, told her about a well-paid singing job at the Deerhurst Resort, so Twain moved her family to Huntsville. She spent the first half of her twenties between Toronto clubs and Deerhurst before signing with a Nashville label. She went on to become one of the best-selling country-pop artists in history, and she has since returned to Toronto while on tour.