Initially a poet, an author and an actor, Félix Leclerc turned to song in the late 1940s for a relatively limited audience. In 1950, Jacques Normand introduced the French manager Jacques Canetti to Leclerc’s Le train du Nord. Canetti immediately invited the artist to perform in France, where he met with meteoric success. The same year, Leclerc wrote Moi, mes souliers, for which he received the Grand Prix du Disque of the Charles Cros Academy, making him the first great Quebec chansonnier.