She won a Grammy for the song about secret love and small-town parochialism famously recorded by Bonnie Raitt, which she wrote in just 20 minutes
Singer-songwriter Shirley Eikhard was just 12 years old when she first performed in public. It happened in 1968 at a jamboree in Cobourg, Ont., with her country and western parents on stage with her. She sang Gordon Lightfoot’s“I was terrified,” she told The Globe and Mail in 1972. “But I found I liked the appreciation of the audience.”Ms. Eikhard, a shy but agreeable performer and a Grammy-winning songwriter, died on Dec. 15, at Headwaters Health Care Centre in Orangeville, Ont.
Ms. Murray wanted to record it, but the three producers she was working with weren’t enamoured with the tune. Though the resulting 1986 album was named, Ms. Eikhard’s composition of that name was not on it. “I was very disappointed because the song was kept on hold for five months and then dropped at the last moment,” Ms. Eikhard would later say.
She was self-taught on guitar, piano, bass, drums, percussion, chromatic harmonica, saxophone, banjo and mandolin.In the early 1990s, Ms. Eikhard composed two scores for Toronto playwright George F. Walker. One of them,, won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for sound design. “She was wonderful to work with, and lovely in every way you could imagine,” Mr. Walker told The Globe.
Offstage, Ms. Eikhard was a gentle, natural person whose wide blue eyes were permanently set to high beam. “There are certain people who glow in the dark,” Ms. Tyson said. The family moved to Oshawa, Ont., when she was eight. A child with a solitary nature, she fancied being a commercial artist, maybe an astronomer. But the pull of music was invincible. “I just had this gift,” she told The Globe in 1995. “I had a musical sense.”
Billed as the “next Anne Murray,” Ms. Eikhard’s recording career progressed modestly in comparison to the international success enjoyed by her fellow Maritimer. Her first five LPs sold less than 30,000 copies combined. Needing cash, she sold her home. “By the time I got into my 20s I realized this is all I know how to do,” she later recalled. ‘’It was kind of scary.’’
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