She has sold over million records, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time and the best-selling female artist in country music history. Raised in Timmins , Ontario, Twain pursued singing and songwriting from a young age before signing with Mercury Nashville Records in the early s. Her self-titled debut studio album was a commercial failure upon release in I Feel Like a Woman! Her fourth studio album, Up! In , after releasing her Greatest Hits album, which produced three singles including " Party for Two ", Twain entered a hiatus, revealing years later that diagnoses with Lyme disease and dysphonia led to a severely weakened singing voice.
Twain returned to performing the following year with an exclusive concert residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace , Shania: Still the One , which ran until In , she started her second Las Vegas residency, Let's Go! Her sixth studio album Queen of Me was released in , and she embarked on the Queen of Me Tour in the same year. Altogether Twain is ranked as the 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era.
She has two sisters, Jill and Carrie Ann. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother moved to Timmins, Ontario , with her daughters. Jerry adopted the girls and legally changed their surname to Twain.
Because of Twain's connection to Jerry, the media have incorrectly reported that she is of Ojibwe descent. My father [Jerry Twain] went out of his way to raise three daughters that weren't even his. For me to acknowledge another man as my father, a man who was never there for me as a father, who wasn't the one who struggled every day to put food on our table, would have hurt him terribly. We were a family. Step-father, step-brothers, we never used that vocabulary in our home.
To have referred to him as my step-father would have been the worst slap across the face to him. She holds a status card and is on the official band membership list of the Temagami First Nation. In Twain was offered a recording contract in Nashville and applied for immigration status into the United States. At that time, by virtue of her stepfather Jerry Twain being a full-blooded Ojibwe and the rights guaranteed to indigenous Americans in the Jay Treaty , she became legally registered as having 50 percent indigenous American blood.
