There is an interesting thing going on here...perhaps someone can count up the number of folks influenced by recording stars, and those influenced by someone playing live in front of them. Now I had all kinds of recordings that influenced me...mostly my folks' Maritime folk music records (they moved to Ottawa shortly before I was born). But to speak to the actual question...I always remember a public-school talent show kinda thing, around grade five or six. Three girls in my class--Kathy Kornelissen, Karen Parker and Hannah Ayukawa, I think--got up with a guitar and sang "Four Strong Winds". I just sat there as gob-smacked as a ten-year-old boy can get, and that is pretty goddamn gobsmacked in case you're wondering. I'd never heard the song before, and it was the only time I ever saw these girls sing with a guitar...I was just plain smitten. I like to think that my reaction was "I could do that", but really it was just "Wow, that's fantastic." (subtext: "Huh? It's not on a record!") I will love that song till the day I die, just for the memory of when it carried me out of the cruddy interior of Fairfield Public School, to someplace where those winds sure can blow cold, way out there. W-O p.s. a couple of years ago the former Fairfield Public School was knocked down and replaced with 155 rowhouses. I guess the rsidents' kids will go to school somewhere but they sure won't have the acreage we enjoyed at recess..."You don't know what you've got till it's gone".
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