Cyrano (see-rah-noh)

It's hard to be a bard.
It's harder when you're so ugly even your personality can't make up for it, and a mask can't hide your enormous nose, only highlight it.
It's even harder when you live in Eriador, where nothing ever happens, bards are extremely rare, mages don't exist, and even inheriting a magic cloak from your eccentric great-uncle that lets you turn invisible once per day is something that gets gossiped about for years.
So one day Cyrano packed his bag and left his home and real name behind.
At first, his journey was relatively uneventful - visit towns, study legends and popular songs, and play in taverns, singing ditties and legends while playing his lute. The usual.
But one day, that changed, when Cyrano and some other travelers were hired to escort a caravan: a grumpy dwarf, an elf who disliked all humans, a hobbit more interested in cooking than fighting, and a mage from the south riding a strange mount called a camel.
Perfect.
The caravan's journey was relatively uneventful, but the adventure started afterwards, when some of the travelers decided to sleep in a ruin rather than splurge for a tavern, and were visited by a nature spirit, who bestowed upon them a quest: to retrieve the paintings in which her essence had been captured, so that she could destroy them. With nothing more interesting to do, the group agreed, and so began their travels.
Their journey involved both adventures and misadventures - trying (and failing) to impersonate a diplomatic party, searching a ruin for a magical object to trade to a mage princess in exchange for the painting she possessed, and so on. All good inspiration.
With Cyrano's performances their main source of income, the group learned to be frugal: a trap that spewed sleeping powder was triggered until it ran out and the powder harvested, wine with a sleeping poison was used to coat the stones for the hobbit's sling, and when the hobbit was blessed by the Valar Yahanna so that he could make plants and fungi grow in an area by walking three circles around it, healing herbs were purchased and replicated. Cyrano himself focused his magical studies on stealth initially, rather than imbuing magic into his music - while he was not a good fighter, he could usually deliver one good blow in a fight, and that's all you need sometimes.
After their quest was completed, more quests came, courtesy of the leaders they'd encountered in the process: defeating a group of bandits, searching ancient dwarven ruins for the sword of a long-dead king to give to the currently-alive king, escorting a group of hobbits west, slaying a family of trolls that was menacing a village, impersonating a traveling circus while investigating how open a country's population was to a peaceful unification... some more eventful than others, but all of them involving lots of travel. The hobbits were very starstruck when they were allowed to visit Rivendell with the party, too.
With their journeys, the adventurers grew in strength through their experiences, and the party's composition changed - the hobbit traveled west to fertilize the new home an elven queen had allowed hobbits to settle in, another hobbit, a friendlier elf woman, and a human ranger joined, and even after the undercover mission ended, the recruited circus members decided to stay with the group, keeping their cover intact. Cyrano's role changed, too - with their growing reputation, the group no longer had to worry about money, so Cyrano mostly regaled those they met with songs of their adventures as an introduction - guards driven to applause, rules brought to tears, audiences caught up in the music. With the mage's light shows, the tightrope and knife-throwing acts, and Cyrano's music, they made a fine traveling circus, too, albeit one that had no problems bringing down any orc raiders and bandit troops that saw them as easy prey.
Cyrano did not know how long their group would stay together, or where their journeys would take them, but he did know two things:

• There are stories and songs to be found wherever you go, whether it's in the libraries of Rivendell or the cave of a troll family.
• It's a lot easier to write songs and stories about adventures if you're there when it happens: the best answer to "who tells your story?" is "I do, after some editorializing".