On those late nights at the Mattagami Hotel in Timmins, or whichever bar gig Sharon had found, singing "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose", Eilleen truly did not have much left to lose. The family needed the 20 bucks she earned and Sharon kept telling her she needed the experience. She hated it, really hated it, didn't feel like singing at that time of night at all. She was eight years old. She loved to sing... but she hated performing.

Eilleen could always sing. She has no memory of a time before music. She did not sing nursery rhymes like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with a toddler's lisp and a wandering tune, instead she held the melody and experimented with phrasing and tone. At six she was singing the harmony parts because they were more interesting. "I remember being put up on top of a countertop by my mother when I was three," she recalls. "I would always sing out loud to the jukebox.

" For Show and Tell at her primary school six year old Eilleen decided to sing John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads. At home everybody loved it, unfortunately the horde of first graders were less impressed and they teased her mercilessly, christening her 'Twang' and instilling in her an innate fear of performing in public that was to last a decade. "All my classmates thought I was being a show off and it created serious inhibitions for me," she recalled in a letter to her fans written in 1994. "From that point on I was afraid to perform."

Sharon however would have none of that. She recognised that her daughter had a special talent - because of the way she would harmonise with songs on the radio, she adored the Mamas and the Papas, the Carpenters and the Supremes - or extemporise new parts to the country songs on the creaky 8 track player - Jerry's favourite Charley Pride, Waylon Jennings, Dolly, Tanya,

After Sharon and Jerry married they rented a small house on Bannerman Avenue in Timmins. Jerry had a job on the line in the mines which he hated, it was physically demanding and inside. The following year the Twains moved down south to Sudbury. When she was ten Jill was given an acoustic guitar but somehow it was her little sister who always ended up hugging it. One day Jerry was fooling around on it and started showing Eilleen how to hold it - no easy task as the little girl was dwarfed by the instrument - so that her left hand could travel up and down the fretboard while her right hand strummed across the strings. Jerry was not an accomplished picker but he knew his way round a couple of instrumentals and taught her the basic chords.