Listen to him on record, and Jeff Healey’s blues guitar playing was stunning. Watched him perform, and it was nothing less than astonishing. Healey – born with retinoblastoma, a genetic cancer which robbed him of his sight as a baby and led to the secondary cancers which caused his death on 2 March 2008 at the age of 41 – had started playing guitar at the age of three.

11/04/2008

His blindness, combined with the difficulty of holding a guitar at such an early age, led him to adopt a highly unusual playing method, laying the guitar across his lap, plucking the strings with his right hand like a pedal steel player.
By the time he was 8, he had graduated from open chords to standard tuning and begin using his left hand like a pianist to fret the notes. With no visual reference to correct him as he grew older, what began as a matter of practicality became his set technique, and he stuck with it despite later attempts to teach him orthodox fingering. He claimed it gave him more flexibility for hammer-ons and string-bends – plus bringing the thumb more into play – and he developed an extraordinary fluency, such that he was quite capable of matching and even outplaying the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughn when they performed together.
Norman Jeffrey Healey was born on 25 March 1966, in Toronto, Canada and adopted at birth. He was playing and singing in bands before he was a teenager, leading his first band – Blue Direction – at 14. He had settled into the Jeff Healey Band’s trio format with Joe Rockman (bass) and Tom Stephen (drums) before he was 20, by which time he had already played with blues luminaries including Albert Collins, Vaughn and BB King.

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