A second, self-published LP, Part of the Mystery, was released in 1980, and a third, I Am Not What I Seem, in 1982. MacNeil performed widely in the Maritimes, where she made a breakthrough with the mainstream pop audience that eventually embraced her enthusiastically, and on a national scale, in the mid-1980s. After living for a time in Ottawa, where she sang at political rallies, she returned to Cape Breton in 1979. In 1975, MacNeil independently released her debut LP, Born a Woman, and began appearing at folk festivals, including the Mariposa Folk Festival. Her early audiences were generally at women’s groups, rallies, and conventions. Her early compositions (“Born a Woman,” “War of Conditioning”) were protest songs with a feminist perspective. She first sang publicly in 1971 in Toronto, at folk venues including The Riverboat. Eventually, she became involved in the women’s movement, attending meetings of the Toronto Women’s Caucus, which led her to write songs as a mode of self-expression.Īs a performer, MacNeil had a later start than most. She became pregnant as a teenager and at age 17 she moved with her child to Toronto to seek work, finding a job at an Eatons department store.
Gifted with a natural singing voice, she had some lessons but was mostly self-taught. Her childhood was made even more difficult by a sexually abusive uncle and the need for repeated surgeries to repair a cleft palate. MacNeil was born into a large, poor family with alcoholic parents in Cape Breton. She was inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame and named to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada. She released 24 albums and received three Juno Awards, four Canadian Country Music Association (CCMA) Awards, a Gemini Award, and 11 East Coast Music Awards. One of several Nova Scotian singers who brought the Cape Breton music scene to national and international prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, she was the top-selling country artist in Canada in 19, outselling such American stars as Garth Brooks and Clint Black. Her passionate, resonant voice sang with both strength and fragility about overcoming adversity, earning her the loyalty of mainstream pop and country audiences in Canada and abroad. Rita MacNeil was a soft-spoken, independent singer-songwriter in the folk, pop and country genres. Rita MacNeil, CM, ONS, singer, songwriter (born in Big Pond, NS died 16 April 2013 in Big Pond, NS).
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