Jeff Healey

A blind Canadian jazz guitar singer, Jeff Healey, who can see through the eyes of music.

Jeff Healey is one of the Canada’s most successful exports and one of the world’s most celebrated guitarists, the Jeff Healey Band sold millions of records. Healey lost his sight at the age of one, after developing eye cancer. He began playing guitar when he was three years old and began performing with his band Blues Direction at the age of 17. Healey formed the Jeff Healey Band in 1985, featuring bassist Joe Rockman and drummer Tom Stephen. This trio released one single on its own Forte record label, which led to a contract with Arista Records. The Jeff Healey Band released their debut album, See the Light, in 1988 and the guitarist immediately developed a devoted following in blues-rock circles. Featuring the hit single “Angel Eyes,” the record went platinum in the U.S. While the Jeff Healey Band’s subsequent records were popular, none were as successful as the debut.

What made Jeff Healey different from other blues-rockers was also what kept some listeners from accepting him as anything other than a novelty — the fact that the blind guitarist played his Fender Stratocaster on his lap, not standing up. With the guitar in his lap, Healey could make unique bends and hammer-ons, making his licks different and more elastic than most of the competition. Unfortunately, his material leaned toward standard AOR blues-rock, which rarely let him cut loose, but when he did; his instrumental prowess could be shocking.

In 2008, a month before the release of his last studio-recorded blues album, Mess of Blues, Healey died from cancer.

No doubt, his unusual story embarked in the history of music. He taught us to see what he had seen- the beauty of music.

Joaquin Rodrigo

A world class composer Joaquin Rodrigo was blinded by complications from diphtheria at the age of three. 

Joaquin Rodrigo was born on November 22, 1901, in Sagunto, Valencia, Spain. He was blinded by complications from diphtheria when he was three years old. His condition did not improve after a surgery and then glaucoma blinded him completely. Rodrigo confessed without regret, that his blindness predisposed him to music. Young Rodrigo studied piano and violin at a school for blind from the age of eight. By the age of 20 Rodrigo became an accomplished pianist. His first compositions for piano were written in 1923 and premiered a year later. In 1927 Rodrigo moved to Paris. There he studied with Paul Dukas and also became a friend of Manuel de Falla.

Joaquin Rodrigo was responsible for establishing the guitar as a classical concert instrument. He is best known for his three-part ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ (1939), the first concert work composed specifically for guitar and symphony orchestra. This innovative concert work was created for Spanish guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza, who premiered ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ in 1940 with the Barcelona Philharmonic Orchestra. The work has become among the most well-known pieces of Spanish music.

Rodrigo received several awards and decorations for his music. He also taught music for many years. He was using a special Braille machine and was active in ‘Arte y Propaganda de la ONCE (National Spanish Organization for the Blind). In 1933 Rodrigo married a young Turkish musician Victoria Kamhi. She became his life-long collaborator and contributor to his creativity until her death in 1997. Joaquin Rodrigo died on July 6, 1999, in Madrid, Spain, and was laid to rest next to his wife Victoria in the cemetery at Aranjuez, Spain.

Ray Charles

A multi-talented blind black musician who grew up blind. 

Ray Charles Robinson was an American singer-songwriter, musician and composer known as Ray Charles. He was blind by the age of 7, and his mother sent him to a state-sponsored school, the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, Florida—where he learned to read, write and arrange music in Braille. He also learned to play piano, organ, sax, clarinet and trumpet. The breadth of his musical interests ranged widely, from gospel to country, to blues.

He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company. Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business,” although Charles downplayed this notion.

“I can’t retire from music any more than I can retire from my liver. You’d have to remove the music from me surgically—like you were taking out my appendix.”– Ray Charles

Ray Charles died from acute liver disease Thursday June 10, 2004. He was 73. He left behind a long list of hits and Grammy awards and the musicians he influenced are as diverse in genre as the music he wrote, arranged, performed and recorded. The great Ray Charles was an explorer who returned time and again from expeditions across musical boundaries to give us, in his own unique way, melodious stories and charts of his adventures. In so doing he changed what had previously been only a black and white territorial paper map of American music into a 3-D, solid terrain model, full of color.