Elma treasure waiting to be discovered

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This article was published 12/09/2011 (5338 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ELMA — Friends have told singer Christine Schuhmann she’s a combination of Sarah Brightman, Celine Dion and Nana Mouskouri.

They might have slipped Slim Whitman onto the list. The gal can yodel. In a three-octave range, yet.

“Before telephones, they used to yodel in the Alps to communicate,” explained Schuhmann, who is originally from Switzerland where yodelling began. “They would know what certain types of yodelling meant. If you needed a doctor, there was a yodel for that. If you had a baby girl or baby boy, there was a yodel for that. Everyone back then could yodel.”

(In Manitoba, the Sioux used smoke signals for long-distance communication: fire in the morning signalled bad news, two fires within metres of each other meant enemies had been sighted, it says in Red River Settlement (1853), by Alexander Ross.)

Yodelling in country and western music can sound more like loons taking choir practise. Schuhmann does traditional European yodelling. She sat on her living room sofa and yodelled a song that turned an ink-stained wretch to butter. Crowds go crazy when she yodels, Schuhmann said.

She can do more than yodel, of course. This summer, the Elma chanteuse had no less than a chart-topping song in Germany. Du bringst die Farben zurueck in mein Leben (You Bring the Colours Back into my Life) climbed to No. 1 for several weeks.

Schuhmann was recruited to perform the song by a German record label that wrote it. She sang it in a TV competition in Switzerland called the Alpine Grand Prix and earned a commemorative award. The song was then picked up by European radio stations.

While in Europe, Schuhmann performed at outdoor concerts in Switzerland and Austria. She has toured Europe several times, as well as Canada and the United States, including New York. She’s hopeful the Grand Prix song will open some doors.

Christine’s family emigrated from Switzerland when she was 20, landing in Montreal. Hermann Schuhmann’s family emigrated from Germany the same year, 1981, settling on a farm near Whitemouth. Ten years later, Hermann was travelling Canada when he heard Christine singing solo at a Montreal church service.

“I got goosebumps. Her voice was so beautiful I couldn’t believe it,” recalled Hermann. They married a year later.

Christine agreed to move with Hermann to Manitoba, settling in a rural residential location just outside Elma, 80 kilometres east of Winnipeg. Pursuing a singing career from a small railway town like Elma is difficult, compared to Montreal.

But Schuhmann, whose day job is physician’s assistant at the Whitemouth District Health Centre, doesn’t regret the move. “I like the calm, I like the silence” of rural life, she said.

Her parents joined her two years later, prompted by Quebec’s threat to separate from Canada, and bought property next door.

She has self-produced six CDs and is working on a seventh. Not being able to afford a large band, the background music is recorded.

Schuhmann yodels on the first three songs on her most recent CD, Sounds of Music, released in 2008. Then there’s a famine until song No. 14, the Italian song, La Storia della Montagna (The Story of the Mountain), but it’s worth the wait. Schuhmann tosses away the lyric sheet and yodels lustily.

She mainly sings the standards but from Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France, as well as English ones, having a knack for languages from growing up in polyglotic Switzerland. Her songs are played on CKJS Radio, Winnipeg’s multicultural station.

People have suggested she is a Susan Boyle waiting to be discovered — the Scottish singer who came from nowhere to win the reality show, Britain’s Got Talent. Schuhmann has considered auditioning for a reality show such as Canada’s Got Talent or Canadian Idol.

Schuhmann lends her time to sing in churches and care homes throughout the region.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca

 

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