My first musical performance in public was playing the piano at a kid's music festival in Dalhousie, NB. I didn't play the piano very well (I hated to practice) but I didn't place too badly. Prior to the event a boy next to me told me that his mother told him that if he didn't win, he'd have to quit Cub Scouts. He won. I was quite glad for him.

I hated piano and gave it up as soon as I was allowed enough personal responsibility to make that decision. However, it was from my piano teacher that I heard my first broadside ballad (at least that I can recall) a song about the capture of the fortress of Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, by an Anglo-American force. ("Prepare British boys, your hearts for new joys/ For Cape Breton and Louisbourg's taken . . .") I had found a copy in the house and had the teacher play and sing it because I had been to the reconstructed fortress. I haven't heard the song since.

After I gave up piano, I still sang in choirs at these festivals, mostly doing pseudo-Jacobite tunes about Bonnie Charlie and such, and a few carols at Christmas. It was a lot of fun, especially because our choir teacher was a no-nonsense French-Canadian ex-nun, whose high standards meant that we won quite often.