
The Bard is in the Player's Handbook (PHB) for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition (AD&D1e), but it is not the class that any other edition presents. You'll find it on p. 117; it's Appendix II, and explicitly marked as optional if it is allowed at all.
You cannot enter play with a brand-new 1st level character as a Bard. You have to go through two other classes first before you can qualify to become a Bard, and both of those classes as well as the final qualifications. Those classes are Fighter and Thief, two classes with nigh-antithetical ethos despite a certain synergy to their skillsets, which then must trained by a Druid before achieving 1st level as a Bard.
That's a lot of play time just to pick up a lute and be a pansy git. Therefore, we can conclude that this Bard is not.
As with the Druid, this version of the Bard takes its inspiration from the Celts as known in the 1970s; the lengthy qualification track is meant to mirror the profession career track of a Bard in an abstract and playable form.
Take a man who began as a burgeoning warlord, who then became a skilled thief or spy and maybe a gang-leader, before kneeling before the Hierophants to achieve initiation in the Bardic Schools- and make no mistake, that is what that final step with the Druids is about.
Force, Guile, Wisdom synergized into a cohesive whole. That is the Bard- and seen by this perspective it is no surprise that The Forgotten Realms' most notorious not-so-secret society (The Harpers) were full of them and as such were so believable in being so effective.