She also won 11 East Coast Music Awards starting with female recording of the year in 1989- 19, and Factor recording of the year for three years running (1989‒1991), culminating with the Lifetime Achievement Award. She is an inductee to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame. MacNeil was Canada’s top-selling country singer-songwriter in 19, and was the Canadian Country Music Awards’ entertainer of the year 1991-1992. I’ll Accept the Rose was nominated for ECMA and CCMA song of the year, and the patriotic Home I’ll Be, her homage to Cape Breton, was ECMA’s 1991 song of the year. Working Man, the popular coal miner’s anthem which she famously performed with the Men of the Deeps, soared to No. Her highest charting single, We’ll Reach the Sky Tonight, earned SOCAN’s 1991 country award. Her best-known songs indicate her wide cross-genre appeal and often spoke of Nova Scotia. More Junos followed as top female vocalist (1990) and top country female vocalist (1991). With the successful single Flying On Your Own and the double-platinum album of the same name, MacNeil won her first Juno award in 1987 as most promising female vocalist. It’s emotions that I write about.… People are looking for honesty, something real.” She told the “Christian Science Monitor”: “The music is universal. She would sing those emotions on stage, typically appearing barefoot sporting a fedora. Her writing technique was unusual: The music and lyrics came together in her head simultaneously in the shape of songs. MacNeil often described her songwriting (and the voice with a rich vibrato which she described as “Something that was given to me a gift,”) as arising from strong emotions for people or places. Like MacNeil herself, her melody-driven, heartfelt songwriting resisted classification, sometimes country, sometimes hinting of folk, gospel or blues. With her matronly, homespun, shy persona, MacNeil endeared herself to grassroots audiences nationwide and enjoyed commercial success despite not conforming to the music industry’s expectations. She recorded three albums independently beginning with “Born a Woman” (1975), but it was “Flying On Your Own,” her 1986 debut album with Virgin Records, that became her commercial breakthrough. MacNeil eventually returned to the Cape Breton home where she had experienced early hardships including poverty, abuse, and surgeries to repair her cleft lip. Gradually, her songwriting evolved into a broader folk-pop autobiographical style, and she performed for rallies, coffeehouses, folk clubs, the Mariposa and other folk festivals, and Vancouver’s Expo 86. MacNeil became involved with the women’s movement in the early 1970s, writing feminist protest songs.
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