Juxtaposing fresh-faced country girl innocence with a hard-nosed sense of business practicality, Anne Murray is a Canadian national treasure who, from the early 1970s, became a singing star throughout North America. By the late 1990s, her velvety contralto voice and personable delivery had taken her from her simple beginnings as a ukulele-strumming folk singer to her high-profile status as one of the most highly paid Canadian entertainers. Though ultra-cool music critics sometimes sneered at her efforts to broaden her genre (one called her disco album "Madonna of Sunnybrook Farm"), even they found it difficult to fault Murray within the folk-pop-country niche that she made her own.

Murray was born in the Nova Scotia mining town of Springhill to a Scottish Presbyterian surgeon and a coal miner's daughter, just in time to grow up to the smooth pop sounds of the pre-rock and roll 1950s...