Shore, Sandi (Sandi Loranger)

Websites:  https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/courier-archive/news/mining-the-truth-2928180
Origin: Vancouver, British Columbia, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Hello Robert,

I have included a few photos and a link to an article that she was interviewed for, a few years before she passed for fun. I guess technically, she is indirectly responsible for the discovery of Loretta Lynn since she told Don and Chuck to come by for the jams at the Chicken Coop. We always chuckle about Mom's involvement in the discovery, but not the part how Don was disregarded. This was the beginning of Mom's music music career. I am certain Mom would certainly have become a star if her life circumstances didn't take her in another direction in the end. We are forever grateful to her and the sacrifices she made as she was an amazing Mother and gave up a lucrative career in music to care for her family at the time. She is dearly missed but never forgotten and I know she is looking down on us right now, feeling a little joy that her music and her unique voice is still being remembered and enjoyed by others.

Anyway, the owners of the Chicken Coop were my Mom's relatives, Clancy Loranger was my Mom's uncle, and Don Grashey and Chuck Williams were my Mom's producers and long-time family friends of ours. I remember them both fondly since they were around since I and my sister were young children. I still aspire to re-record a version of Like a Madness (I am a singer/writer as well), but I lost the copyright/writer information that Don faxed to me many moons ago which I would like before I do anything with it.

Here is an excerpt:

Grashey and Williams knew about the hoe downs through one of their young discoveries, Sandi Shore Loranger, the McGregors niece. The stage was set for a momentous meeting of country music minds, or, as Mike Harling likes to say, Ground Zero of Lynns career. But more than 50 years later, there is no mention of the iconic singers Fraserview debut on her website. And no mention in her recent book, Honky Tonk Girl: My Life in Lyrics.

Sandi, who was only 15 years old at the time, has a hazy memory of the American singer performing to a packed barn. I was more into pop music than country, more interested in the beautiful dresses that Aunt Irene sewed for my singing career, but I do remember Loretta was well received by the pickers who were there that day.
-Julie Wilson (Sandi Shore's daughter)

If not for a brief obituary in the weekly Vancouver Courier, Sandi Shore might have died a completely forgotten woman.

The Vancouver singer (who was actually born as Sandra Loranger and died as Sandra Wilson) was a familiar figure on the stages of the lower mainland clubs throughout the 1950s and 1960s. After winning a talent contest for local radio station CKNW when she was just thirteen years old, Shore found herself booked - chaperoned by her mother, naturally - at places like the Cave, Isy's, the Arctic Club and the Orpheum Theatre, opening for the likes of the Mills Brothers, the Four Lads, Mitzi Gaynor and, of course, local big band leader Dal Richards.

By the sixties, with tastes changing rapidly, Shore hooked up with Gaiety Records honcho Don Grashey, whose fledgling venture was sort of spinning its wheels after releasing eleven straight records by Ontario singer Jerry Palmer...and no one else! It was Grashey who would help mould the tiny redhead into a Canuck version of Petula Clark with a couple of singles in 1966 - 'I'll Know Better (Next Time)' and 'Welcome to the Fold' - that still get the occasional play by northern soul spinners across the ocean in Britain.

But it was Shore's final single that turned out to be her best. 'Like a Madness', a cover of an obscure Cameo b-side by the similarly unknown singer Jerri Michaels and issued on the tiny Fort Williams (ON)-based C.M.I. label, was a perfect amalgam of Pet Clark and Sandi Shaw, a buoyant slab of anglo-soul that curiously seems to have troubled no charts at the time. Equally cool is the fact the song was penned by two women, Rose McCoy and Helen Miller, at a time when the industry liked its ladies either stuffed into skirts in front of a microphone or waiting backstage for post-party favours.

Shore, who was no stranger to health struggles having battled through polio as a child, died on Dec. 27th, 2016 at the age of 73 after a long fight with cancer.