The canadian Enciclopedia

History of the Guitar in Canada
European immigrants first brought the guitar to Canada in the mid 17th century. A letter of 4 Oct 1658 (Lettres de la Révérende Mère Marie de I’Incarnation, Tournai 1876), cited in Kallmann’s History of Music in Canada, describes the use of a guitar to lull some Iroquois to sleep, allowing French captives to escape certain death. The officer Jacques Bizard, in 1678 named seigneur of the island near Montreal that would bear his name, possessed a guitar or lute, while the principal businessman in 17th-century Nouvelle-France, Charles Aubert de La Chesnaye, kept a guitar in his work cabinet (La Vie musicale, p. 328, 352). In 1992, archaeologists found, at la Petite Ferme in the Séminaire de Québec, situated on the side of Beaupré east of Quebec, a fragment of a guitar peg box in bone engraved with a lovely muse playing the vièle-à-bras. This fragment, from whose style we can date to 1690-1720, had fallen between the cracks in the floor of the chapel that burned down in 1769 (La Vie musicale, p....