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In 1977, Colin Munn’s mother took him on a bus trip throughout western Canada and into the United States.

The future blues musician was 12 and years away from re-christening himself Colin James. He was still Colin Munn from Regina at the time, a somewhat boisterous seventh-grader who had already started showing promise as a musician.

The bus trip with his mother, Joyce, seemed to come out of the blue. She pulled him out of school, and they travelled for weeks, relying on a network of fellow Quakers for room and board. They knew some of them, but some were strangers. Some were just strange.

In Flagstaff, Ariz., they stayed with a kind and elderly Quaker with a prosthetic arm. In New Orleans, they stayed with an unkind and middle-aged Quaker without a nose. It all seemed quite surreal to young Colin, an eye-opening glimpse into the world outside of Regina.

The biggest miscalculation, however, was when Joyce booked them into the Friends Society in Tallahassee, Fla. She had mistaken it for The Society of Friends, which was a Quaker organization.  It was actually a halfway house for addicts.

“We got in there and there was literally broken glass,” says James, who will be in Calgary Sept. 25 for a Wordfest event. “Our window had rain coming through it. We sort of went, ‘I don’t think we’re in the right place.’ At three or four in the morning, some guy busts into our room talking incoherently.”

The trip took James and his mother throughout Canada and the U.S. They went through Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The segment on this comes early in James’ new book Playing The Changes: A Musician’s Memoir. It may not have been a musical journey, but it was pivotal.

“I loved those trips,” he says. “When me and my mom would have to sit farther down the bus, we’d run into bikers and all kinds. Back then, you could smoke in the back of the bus and drink. As soon as nighttime came, the partiers were in the back, and people trying to mind their own business were in the front. So me and Mom would always try to get up front. Sometimes, we’d end up in the back and hear people talking about snuffing someone out. I would hear things and be like, ‘Mom, are you listening to this?’ ”

It may have offered James an early glimpse of an unhinged life on the road, which has been a major part of his four-decade career spent “hurtling towards wherever the next show is” as one of Canada’s most renowned blues guitarists and singer-songwriters. Playing the Changes chronicles James’ early musical journey, but it ends in 1988, when he is 24 and just released the self-titled debut album that would propel him to national stardom. Prior to that, most of the book is a coming-of-age story, and that Greyhound trip was a turning point in his life, although he didn’t know it at the time. His family life was about to change dramatically.

“Mom knew she was going to be leaving my dad; that was the whole point,” James says. “I try to explain that in the book. That was the only negative about it. This whole trip was all about that.”

Playing with Changes takes readers to James’ earliest days in Regina, where he was born in 1964 as the youngest of four children to Joyce and Bill Munn. His parents were Quakers with a strong sense of community and social justice. They also filled the house with music. They went to folk festivals, and eventually young Colin would participate in folk and Celtic jams with musicians far older than he was, which became common for most of his early years as a musician.

“I embraced the fact that we had a different lifestyle,” James says. “I think I kind of liked that. I would get teased and be called ‘nature boy’ and ‘peacenik.’ But it always made me feel that we were on a slightly different path than most people I knew.”

James would eventually become a serious student of the blues, sparked in 1980 when he heard harmonica player and singer James Cotton at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

Throughout the book, James suggests that he always benefited from being at the right place at the right time. But it also seems that his youthful enthusiasm endeared him to several mentors in his early years, from learning blues licks from Amos Garrett and Colin Linden to playing with musicians such as Billy Cowsill and American harmonica player Dave Burgin. James dedicates a good portion of the book to his relationship with Texas blues great Stevie Ray Vaughan, who took the young musician under his wing. He opened a number shows for Vaughan and the two became friends. While it wasn’t the only factor, the relationship would directly inspire James to develop his own brand and songwriting, which eventually led to his 1988 debut.

In 1984, James had returned to Regina after playing with Burgin in Vancouver. He got a phone call from a booker he had worked with and was asked if he could put together a band overnight to open for Vaughan the next day at the Centennial Auditorium. James describes that jittery first night with a hastily put-together band and set of blues standards. Disaster struck when he broke two strings, but he was saved when he was handed one of Vaughan’s guitars to finish the show. He would eventually join Vaughan on stage, who eventually invited him to tag along on a tour in the U.S.

“Let’s face it, most people don’t want interlopers,” says James. “In a band, you’re a pretty tight-knit group and letting someone like me tour on the bus like I did and getting my own room — the generosity he showed me was unbelievable. I think now people may have been thinking, ‘Hey dude, you don’t want to be liable for this guy.’ I think about it now, and he took a real chance to do that. He did that with Jeff Healey, as well. He did that with Bernard Allison; he did that with Ronnie Baker Brooks. I wasn’t alone. But he was so talented; I guess he had that extra bandwidth to just be a really supportive, friendly person. I really appreciate that. It changed my life.”

Playing the Changes ends in 1988, just as James’ career would take off. So it doesn’t cover Vaughan’s tragic 1990 death from a helicopter accident. James admits that writing a book was “never one of those checklist things for me.” When he was asked, however, he realized his early story could prove inspirational for others.

“Growing up in Regina, as I did, there was a feeling that when you said you wanted to be a musician, there was a lot of negativity thrown in your way,” he says. “I think it maybe has changed now, but at the time it was, ‘You want to be a musician? Oh, good luck. You’re going to be working in a gas station.’ Especially wanting to play the blues, I even got more of that. So, I guess a lot of the impetus came from if I could help someone else from a smaller city or anywhere realize that it doesn’t matter where you’re from: if you’ve got fire in the belly, then you can make it happen.”