Childhood busking in Calgary opens door for young musical mom | Globalnews.ca

What started as a family musical adventure in downtown Calgary has blossomed into some nice opportunities for a couple of talented young women.

Jodie and Nique Bruce began busking as children with their musically-minded dad Hughie.

“Music is one of the common threads that holds the generations together,” Hughie Bruce said.

The trio busked steadily for years, the girls honing their musical skills along the way.

“The money that we made from busking, it funded a lot of the instruments I still use,” Jodie Bruce said.

Now, the mother of a four-month-old daughter, Ruby, Jodie has relocated to Kelowna, B.C. Nique has also moved  to the Okanagan city with the two sisters using it as a base to expand their musical opportunities.

“We’re playing lots of music festivals,” Jodie Bruce said “And then I own a recording studio. There’s a few bands that rent it out as a rehearsal space.”

As for Hughie, his coaching didn’t stop with music. The veteran carpenter also taught his daughters how to build the scaffolding used on construction sites.

“It’s such a good thing to teach your kids how to develop a skill set,” Hughie said.

“It helped pay for a lot of the things that we wanted to do,” said Jodie, who, along with her sister, went on to well-paying jobs putting up scaffolding.

“It funded a lot of my sister’s undergraduate degree – she’s doing her PhD right now in neuromuscular physiology, so scaffolding was a really good skill set to have.”

Jodie says it might not be too long before her daughter Ruby also takes up the family’s musical tradition.

“It’s in her blood, right?”

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