In between battles with the rough seas of the North Atlantic, he entertained the crew by singing and playing the harmonica. To his surprise, he found he was good at it, and that the crew genuinely enjoyed his music. His mother had had him singing in church, and now she presented him with an old wind-up Victrola and a stack of Vernon Dalhart records.
At night Hank memorized the words to “The Prisoner’s Song” and “The Wreck of the Old 97”; he was especially interested in the guitar accompaniment to the ballads, since he had never heard a guitar before. A little later, about 1929 or 1930, his mother added to his stack of records some new ones by a singer with a different style, Jimmie Rodgers. “After hearing the first record by him, nothing would hold me,” he explained.
Within weeks he had gotten a “T. Eaton Special” model guitar (Timothy Eaton being the Canadian equivalent of Sears, Roebuck) and was trying to copy Rodgers. In March 1933 Hank set out on foot for Halifax, the nearest big town, about seventy-five miles up the coast; to make a little money, he peddled housewares on the way, rewarding customers by singing a free song for each purchase.
He brashly approached the local radio station, and soon had his own show on CHNS in Halifax; it was at the depth of the Depression, though, and even with a sponsored program, he could not make ends meet. He found himself standing in bread lines, signing up for relief, and on one especially embarrassing day, shoveling snow with a public works crew right in front of the radio station where he was appearing at night. In the meantime, he met an attractive young Dutch-Irish woman named Minnie Blanche Aalders, who was working at a local chocolate factory.