Canadian music 1: Anne Murray Posted by João on 10:38 pm

I'm a big fan of Canadian music and as a result of that, I'm going to start expressing my love for the music that comes out of 'the Great Northlands' by blogging about it from time to time.

Today I'm going to talk about my brush with Canadian country music superstar Anne Murray right here in Portugal. Well, not Anne Murray herself, but with the song that made her a superstar south of the Canadian border in the 1970s: Snowbird (according to Wikipedia, Snowbird was the first single by a Canadian female solo artist to reach number 1 on the U.S. charts and to earn a gold record).

When I moved to Portugal in 1997, a couple of months after getting here, I went to a second hand cd and vinyl record trade show that was taking place in Cascais. While fingering through a basket of vinyl singles, I came across an old 45 of Anne Murray's Snowbird. I was very surprised by this discovery and, as I scoped it out of the basket, I became even more surprised as the record was a Portuguese pressing of Anne Murray's Snowbird, originally released in 1970 and put out in Portugal by the Portuguese record company Valentim de Carvalho. The single's packaging is all in Portuguese introducing Murray to the Portuguese public. The backside of the vinyl album reads that she's from Nova Scotia, a former student at the Univeristy of New Brunwick and a sign of Canadian's progress in the world of music. The reality is that not too many Canadian artists were making it over here at the time.

I ended up buying it for 200 escudos or, in todays money, 1 euro. The truth is I have never played it but I do fondly display it in my study room at home. I'm not much into country music but I couldn't pass up this little bit of classical Canadian culture in Portuguese, cheaply sold in Portugal. What a find.

Now I can't even imagine how shocked I will be if I ever come across a Stompin Tom Conner Portuguese printed 45.