Ferron (born Deborah Foisy on 1 June 1952) is a Canadian-born singer-songwriter and poet. In addition to gaining fame as one of Canada’s most respected songwriters,[1][2] Ferron, who is openly lesbian, became one of the earliest and most influential lyrical songwriters of the women’s music circuit,[3][4] and an important influence on later musicians such as Ani DiFranco,[5] Mary Gauthier and the Indigo Girls.[6] From the mid-eighties on, Ferron’s songwriting talents have been recognized and appreciated by music critics[7] and broader audiences,[8] with comparisons being made to the writing talents of Van Morrison,[1] Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen.[9]
Born in Toronto and raised around Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, she learned to play guitar at age 11,[10] and left home at 15.[11] Ferron attended Total Ed, an alternative high school in Vancouver, B.C., graduating in 1973.[12] Of her earliest musical memories, she wrote, “my mother’s French Canadian family played music. I heard guitars and banjo and accordion and scrub board and my grandfather clogging. I put it together…music meant fun, meant love and laughter. I started writing songs when I was 10, never saved them after some kids at school found them and teased me about it. I wrote songs and remembered them and when I forgot them I felt they were not important anymore. The next time I saved a song I was 18. It was 1970.” It was with that first saved song that she made her professional debut in 1975, playing the song “Who Loses” at a benefit for the Women’s Press Gang, a Vancouver-based feminist publishing house.
In 1971, Foisy changed her name to Ferron when one of her friends had a dream in which she was called Ferron, which is loosely translated from French meaning iron and rust.[13]
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