The Snowbird’s Story

You probably remember that hurting’ song of the 1930s:

Well, Anne Murray’s version of All of Me gives us more in excruciating showbiz minutiae than we may need or want, but little in the way of reflection or insight.

The press release from Knopf Canada gushes: “Canada’s first lady of song tells the whole story of her astonishing 40-year career in show business … from her humble origins in the tragedy-plagued coal-mining town of Springhill … to her arrival on the world stage.”

The whole story? Well, that may be moot. As is customary in autobiographies, we only have one point of view about the life under examination—the autobiographer’s.

Humble origins? While small-town doctors may not whiz about to their house calls in Cadillacs or Lamborghinis, the life of the doctor in a community of coal miners and their families such as Springhill was hardly “humble.” Indeed, along with the company mine boss, the priest or minister and perhaps the local member of the legislature, the town doctor and his family ranked at the top of the social structure in small-town Nova Scotia. The Dr. Carson Murrays (husband, wife, five sons and one girl) were certainly well off compared to the miners of Springhill.

We do learn about Anne’s affair with Singalong Jubilee host Bill Langstroth, married at the time with kids and 15 years her senior. We learn about their subsequent marriage after Annie gave him a leave-her or leave-me ultimatum, but there is no steamy stuff to titillate us. Twenty-odd years and two children later she gives him the boot, mainly because of his heavy drinking, a casualty of the Anne Murray entertainment phenomenon.

But that’s about it. There really is not that much of a story here, but lots of research for a movie script like those MGM film musicals from the 1950s. Ms. Murray sort of says it all herself in the final awkward, somewhat disingenuous paragraphs: “It’s true that I occasionally had the privilege of meeting and performing for presidents and prime ministers, princesses and queens, experiences I enjoyed immensely.”

But you can’t fundamentally change the person you are, regardless of the neighbourhood you live in or the kind of car you drive or where you buy your clothes.

That’s all well and good. It is reassuring to know that our Annie made it through the furnace of show biz intact, her psyche unsinged. It does little to explain her immense popularity with a certain segment of the population in North America, and to a lesser extent, the English-speaking world. Until Céline Dion appeared on the scene, Anne Murray reigned unchallenged as Canada’s paragon of pop music.

She, like Dion, has had her detractors: Anne Murray was bland. She was white bread. She never took risks with her material. Her voice was unexciting.

And to some extent, that is all true.

But the fact of the matter is that Anne Murray knew who came to her concerts and who bought her albums, all 34 of them. They are the same people who will buy this book. She says, after ruminating just a little about what she would do differently (namely, record fewer albums), that her career:

Clearly, there are lots of those folks out there in the boonies, and they came to her concerts and bought her records, not to be excited by her musicality, but to be comforted by her persona: the unassuming, non-threatening stage personality, the soft alto voice purring those warm and toasty vocals, the self-deprecating humour poking fun at the glitter gowns she was sometimes asked to wear. That is the necessary task of the entertainer: to connect with the audience. Anne Murray had her shtick. It came to her naturally, and she stuck to it. No female Barry White is she; nor, I suspect, is she to be found in many record collections owned by black folks. Our Annie is comfort food for the musical muse.

But the thing to ponder (which All of Me does not very much) is this: how did Anne Murray, above others of her time—Catherine McKinnon gifted with a far better voice, for instance—beat the million-to-one odds of making it as far as she did?

There was no American (or Canadian) Idol television route to propel a singer to stardom overnight way back in the 1960s, and it is unlikely she would have won such a contest in any case. Her voice does not approach that of the improbable sensation Susan Boyle.

Here’s what happened: In 1968, a 20-year-old, chubby-cheeked, curly-blond-haired Anne Murray, who liked to sing in her bare feet, was studying physical education at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton and singing on Saturday nights at the local yacht club to earn pocket money.

My CBC television film crew was in town to shoot a segment for a magazine show. We got invited to a house party where a university student would be performing. It was a set-up: we were the only guests. But once this young blond person started singing, I told the cameraman to get the camera truck and we shot a full 15-minute magazine. Back in Halifax the next day, I hustled Singalong’s host Langstroth and producer Manny Pittson into the screening room. After one song, Pittson came up close to the image on the wall. He turned to Langstroth, “Isn’t that the one we turned down last year?” Suffice it to say, the film changed their minds. The television cameras loved her too. So did the Singalong audience.

She had upset her first odds.

Then came Gene MacLellan, the talented, troubled singer-songwriter from Prince Edward Island. He had written a country-folk ballad in 25 minutes, called “Snowbird,” about taking the singer away from his misery: “To that land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow.” The song got MacLellan into the cast of Singalong Jubilee as a kind of house composer. The tiny wings of “Snowbird” bore Anne Murray from Springhill, Nova Scotia, to the top of the Billboard charts when it was released as the B side of the single from her second album.

But how did the song get noticed? Well, a disc jockey at a radio station in Windsor, Ontario, decided he liked the B side better than the tune on the A side, the one he was supposed to play and promote. The airplay spilled over into Detroit, and radio stations there began to get requests for “Snowbird,” which they happily acceded to. The Anne Murray snowball was rolling downhill and gaining momentum.

She had beaten her second set of odds through a series of improbable and unpredictable events.

Call it luck. Call it coincidence. Or, if you happen to be a disciple of Carl Jung, call it synchronicity: a series of events that embody a wisdom within them, far beyond that of our conscious knowledge.

Anne Murray touched a chord. She connected. It was as if there was an audience out there just waiting for her to happen.

All of Me tells us how it happened, but not why.