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, Ferron, who is openly lesbian, became one of the earliest and most influential lyrical songwriters of the women's music circuit, and an important influence on later musicians such as Ani DiFranco, Mary Gauthier and the Indigo Girls. From the mid-eighties on, Ferron's songwriting talents have been recognized and appreciated by music critics and broader audiences, with comparisons being made to the writing talents of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen. Early life Born in Toronto and raised around Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, she learned to play guitar at age 11, and left home at 15. Ferron attended Total Ed, an alternative high school in Vancouver, B.C., graduating in 1973. 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. Ferron discovered later in her life that she had Métis ancestry. She said in 2017, "My dream is to die a lesbian, First Nations, Canadian." 1970s and 1980s While still based in Vancouver, Ferron established her own record label, Lucy Records, and released her self-titled debut album in 1977. The album was recorded in a video studio on two-track equipment, and, as she stated, "the production quality was pretty poor". Nonetheless, all one thousand copies printed sold quickly. Shortly after two self-produced albums, Ferron (1977) and Ferron Backed Up (1978) she joined forces with Gayle Scott, who would prove to be her longtime manager, executive producer, and