Norman Jeffrey Healey (March 25, 1966 – March 2, 2008) was a Canadian blues, rock and jazz singer, guitarist, and songwriter who attained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Healey was raised in the city's west end. He was adopted as an infant; his adoptive father was a firefighter. When he was almost one year old, Healey lost his sight due to retinoblastoma, a rare cancer of the eyes. His eyes had to be surgically removed, and he was given ocular prostheses.
Healey began playing guitar when he was three, developing his unique style of playing the instrument flat on his lap. At nine years old, his musical talents were showcased in an interview on the TV Ontario children's programme Cucumber. When he was 15, Healey formed the band Blue Direction, a four-piece that primarily played bar-band cover tunes and featured bassist Jeremy Littler, drummer Graydon Chapman, and schoolmate Rob Quail on second guitar. The band played at clubs in Toronto, including the Colonial Tavern. Healey began hosting a jazz and blues show on radio station CIUT-FM, where he was known for playing from his massive collection of vintage 78 rpm gramophone records.
Shortly thereafter he was introduced to bassist Joe Rockman and drummer Tom Stephen, with whom he formed a trio, the Jeff Healey Band. The band made their first public appearance at the Birds Nest, located upstairs at Chicago's Diner on Queen Street West in Toronto. They received a write-up in Toronto's NOW magazine, and soon were playing almost nightly in local clubs, such as Grossman's Tavern and the famed blues club Albert's Hall (where Jeff Healey was discovered by guitarists Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert Collins).
After being signed to Arista Records in 1988, the band released the album See the Light, which appeared on the RPM Top 100 chart in 1989. It featured the hit single "Angel Eyes" and the song "Hideaway", which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. While the band was recording See the Light, they were also filming (and recording for the soundtrack of) the Patrick Swayze film Road House. Healey had numerous acting scenes in the movie with Swayze, as his band was the house cover band for the bar featured in the movie.
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| Healey with Stevie Ray Vaughn |
In 1990, the band won the Juno Award for Canadian Entertainer of the Year. The albums Hell to Pay and Feel This, gave Healey 10 charting singles in Canada between 1990 and 1994, including a cover of The Beatles'"While My Guitar Gently Weeps", which featured George Harrison and Jeff Lynne on backing vocals and acoustic guitar.
By the release of the 2000 album Get Me Some, Healey began to concentrate on jazz. He went on to release three CDs of music of traditional American jazz from the 1920s and 1930s. He had been sitting in with these types of bands around Toronto since the beginning of his music career. Though known primarily as a guitarist, Healey also played trumpet during live performances. His main jazz group for touring and recording was Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards.
Healey was an avid record collector and amassed a collection of well over 30,000 78 rpm records. Starting in 1990 he hosted a radio program of very early jazz on CIUT at the University of Toronto with Colin Bray. Later he went national on CBC Radio's program entitled My Kind of Jazz, in which he played records from his vast vintage jazz collection. He moved the show two years later to Jazz FM - CJRT; as a part of ongoing celebrations for what would have been Healey's 50th birthday in 2016, the latter program began to air in repeats Wednesdays 9pm on jazz.fm.
For many years, Healey toured throughout North America and Europe and performed at his club, "Healey's" on Bathurst Street in Toronto. The club moved to a bigger location at 56 Blue Jays Way and was rechristened "Jeff Healey's Roadhouse." Though he had lent his name to the club and often played there, Jeff Healey did not own or manage the bar. At the time of his death, he had been planning to perform a series of shows in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, with his other band, the Jeff Healey Blues Band (aka the "Healey's House Band") in April 2008.
Over the years, Healey toured and sat in with many well-known performers, including The Allman Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, BB King, ZZ Top, Steve Lukather, Eric Clapton and many more. In 2006, Healey appeared on Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan's CD/DVD Gillan's Inn.
On January 11, 2007, Healey underwent surgery to remove metastatic tissue from both lungs. In the previous 18 months, he had two sarcomas removed from his legs. On March 2, 2008, Healey died of sarcoma in his home town of Toronto at the age of 41. He was buried at Park Lawn Cemetery, Mausoleum & Cremation Centre in Etobicoke, Ontario. Healey's death came a month before the release of Mess of Blues, which was his first rock/blues album in eight years. (Edited from Wikipedia)