Born in Toronto in 1966, Healey lost his eyesight before his first birthday due to a rare form of eye cancer. He got his first guitar at three, and began playing lap style with a slide in open tuning—eventually learning how to fret in standard tuning. Healey’s unorthodox playing style reached a wide audience when he appeared in the 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle Roadhouse.

Healey would grace the August cover of GP that same year, and he detailed his technique: “I can use all five fingers on my left hand for different types of vibrato. I do a lot of bending with my thumb, and I use it to hit notes above and beyond where you could normally reach.”

That last statement is a huge part of what made Healey’s playing so unique. In addition to blazing speed and several flavors of wicked vibrato, it was his ability to throw in wide interval jumps and superhuman, Albert King-style monster bends that set Healey apart. He worked his blues magic with a Squier Strat loaded with Evans pickups into a Marshall. He would run the Marshall clean, and get his searing overdrive from a DOD stompbox.

Healey’s first and deepest musical love was jazz from the ’20s and ’30s, and he had a collection of more than 25,000 records. He would spin his deep knowledge on his radio program, My Kinda Jazz, and he formed Jeff Healey’s Jazz Wizards in order to gig those tunes. He would blow killer trumpet lines (he also played clarinet), in addition to dishing out awesome uptown jazz guitar on a 1940s Gibson L-12 archtop. He was known to be an incredibly sensitive musician, with a gift for dynamics and listening that made for compelling live performances. Watch the YouTube video of Healey sitting in with Edgar Winter for a glimpse. He does a positively telepathic call-and-response with Winter’s vocal that leaves Steve Lukather slack-jawed in amazement.

Healey got back to the blues for his most recent release, Mess of Blues, which came out a month after his passing from cancer. It’s interesting that the music that brought him his most widespread recognition would bookend his recording career. Despite his massive chops and millions of sales in the genre, the blues never defined him. He remained incredibly humble about his own abilities to the end. As he told GP in 2007: “Ironically, I never had much experience collecting or playing the classic Chicago blues of the ’50s, and I don’t know much about it.

Although I play guitar, I never considered myself a ‘guitar player.’ At 40 years of age, I have finally come to the realization that I’m a musicologist who happens to have a
talent for playing music.”

The Healey family has asked that interested parties make donations to Daisy’s Eye Cancer Research Fund (daisyseyecancerfund.ca).

www.jeffhealey.com