In 1968, 23-year-old Anne Murray made her first LP for Arc Records. Called What About Me, it was produced by Brian Ahern, the former music director of Singalong Jubilee, the popular CBC TV show from Halifax. Ahern had been one of several to discover her two years earlier while she was a first year high schoolteacher of physical education in Summerside, Prince Edward Island.
 

Anne Murray is as well known in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and the U.S.A. as she is in Canada, her homeland. Although “Snowbird” launched an international singing career for her in 1968, she has not drifted off to the glitz and glamour of the showbiz world. Instead, she has kept close connections to her Nova Scotian roots, in particular, and to Canada’s maritime provinces, in general. [Photo, courtesy Denise Grant]

Now, 30 years and 30 albums later, with sales approaching 30 million, Anne Murray is considered “a Canadian icon” and draws thousands of people of all ages wherever and whenever she performs.

Anne told Globe and Mail reporter Chris Dafoe in 1989, “I think I’ve had a charmed life.” That year, she returned to her native Springhill, Nova Scotia, to open the Anne Murray Centre, which contains memorabilia along with her gold and platinum records, numerous Juno awards and the four Grammys she had then earned as one of North America’s most popular singers over two decades of stardom.

Thousands visit Springhill annually to see the Centre in the town that, before Anne’s success, was best remembered for coal-mining disasters. The only daughter of six children born to Dr. Carson and Marion Murray (Burke), Anne lived in a household that according to a 1975 article in the Saturday Evening Post “was always full of noise and music and fun,” and, as she told People magazine four years later, while “other girls were going out on dates, I was being asked to play centre field.”

Anne took piano lessons and, at age 15, began three years of voice study, winning prizes at local summer music festivals. After a year at Mount St. Vincent University, she attended the University of New Brunswick, obtaining a physical education degree in 1966. That summer she joined the CBC summer program, Singalong Jubilee. When it was continued in the fall, she gave up teaching and, two years later, cut her first solo album for Arc Records.
 

In one of the most highly publicized gigs of her career, Anne Murray huddles with John Lennon, left; Hary Nilsson; Alic Cooper; and ex-Monkee Mickey Dolenz at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, November, 1973. It was the year her first album, Danny's Song, was released and the year after she ("the-girl-next-door") and Glen Campbell jointly made their celebrated album that launched such momentous singles as "By the Time I get to Phoenix." [Photo, coutesy Balmur Ltd. vis EMI Music Canada]

Both Ahern and Bill Langstroth, Jubilee singer-instrumentalist and host whom she married in 1975, believed that, to further her career, she needed a record company with a U.S. affiliation. Paul White at Capitol Records Canada fulfilled her wishes in 1969 with a signed contract. By 1970, she had made a single, “Bidin’ My Time” and, almost as an afterthought, sang “Snowbird” on the flip side. Written by Singalong veteran, Gene MacLellan, it soared to the top of both the country and pop charts in the U.S.A. and Canada. As a result, Anne won her first Juno, was ranked as the best new female vocalist of 1970-71 by two music magazines in the U.S.A. and was the first Canadian woman (Paul Anka was the first Canadian) to be presented with a gold record for selling more than 1,000,000 copies of a single.

She joined Glen Campbell’s Good Time Hour on a semi-regular basis and cut more hit albums and singles, several written by two other Nova Scotian Bluenosers, Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina. Their “Love Song” won Anne her first Grammy in 1974. On her 30th birthday on June 20, 1975, Anne married Langstroth, and, later that year, she took time off when she was pregnant. The same year she received the Order of Canada.

In 1976, she decided to return with a new manager, Leonard Rambeau, an old Nova Scotia friend who had been her “right arm” for years. She soon regained public and critical acclaim. Her 1978 release, “You Needed Me,” sold a million copies within months and won her still another Grammy award, this time in the pop category against such female vocalists as Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, and Olivia Newton-John. She also toured England, Ireland, Germany, Holland, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, New Zealand, and Australia. But between 1980 and 1984, much of her time was spent at Las Vegas so that she could be in one place with her family.
 

When Canadian government officials pulled out all the stops to welcome President Ronald Reagan on his first official visit to Canada in 1981, Anne Murray featured prominently among the best talents Canada had to display at Ottawa's National Arts Centre on March 10 of that year. This view of Anne shows her standing between President Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Reagan. Addressing the gala gathering backstage at Ottawa's Nation Arts Centre is Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, left. [Photo, courtesy Ottawa Citizen via National Arts Centre]

In 1987 Anne made a Canada-wide tour as well as numerous TV specials for the CBC, the 1988 Christmas show drawing 4.2 million viewers, more than Hockey Night in Canada draws almost anytime. A New York Times review said she “is a fine singer ... a veritable princess of taste and style.” Billboard Magazine, after a show of hers at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, called her “glamorous, sassy and open minded,” one who “dares to be witty, well-spoken, self-assured, and almost truculently intelligent.”

In the early 1990s Anne was still performing 70 to 80 concerts a year but, in 1995, seriously considered retirement when manager Leonard Rambeau died of cancer. Within a year, however, she decided to hire Vancouver-based Bruce Allen as her new manager “because Leonard wouldn’t want me to quit” and embarked on a Canada-wide tour in 1996 that took her from coast to coast.

Nearly 30 years a Canadian musical icon, Anne Murray has completed her 30th album. Anne Murray, has sold, on average, nearly one million records a year since turning professional and has received honorary degrees from both the University of New Brunswick and St. Mary’s University.

Mel James