Jeff Healey was a blind jazz, and blues-rock vocalist and guitarist

Jeff Healey Canadian folk singer (born Norman Jeffrey Healey, March 25, 1966 - March 2, 2008) was a blind jazz, and blues-rock vocalist and guitarist who attained musical and personal popularity, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. On March 2, 2008, Healey died of cancer. He was 41 years old.  Born in Toronto, Ontario, 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 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. When he was 15, Jeff Healey formed the band Blue Direction, a four-piece which primarily played bar-band cover tunes and featured bassist Jeremy Littler, drummer Graydon Chapman, and a schoolmate, Rob Quail on second guitar. This band played various local clubs in Toronto, including the Colonial Tavern.

Healey began hosting a jazz and blues show on radio station CIUT-FM where he became known for playing from his massive collection of vintage 78 rpm gramophone records. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to two musicians, bassist Joe Rockman and drummer Tom Stephen, with whom he formed a trio, The Jeff Healey Band. This 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, featuring 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.^[4] 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. 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 his talent in a different musical direction closer to his heart, the appreciation for another original American music form, 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 being Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards.

Healey was an avid record collector and amassed a collection of well over 30,000 78 rpm records. He had, from time to time, hosted a CBC Radio program entitled My Kind of Jazz, in which he played records from his vast vintage jazz collection. He hosted a program with a similar name on Toronto jazz station CJRT-FM; as of 2010, the latter program continued to air in repeats.

For many years, Healey toured throughout North America and Europe and performed at his club, "Healey's" on Bathurst Street in Toronto, where he played with his blues band on Thursday nights and also with his jazz group on Saturday afternoons. 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. (The name came from the 1989 film, Road House, in which Healey appeared.)

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 legendary 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.

Healey discovered and helped develop the careers of other musical artists, including Terra Hazelton and Amanda Marshall. In early 2009, Healey's album Mess of Blues won in The 8th Annual Independent Music Awards for Best Blues Album.

Allan Pineda Lindo, Jr. better known as apl.de.ap (pronounced "Apple D Ap"), is a Filipino-American rapper, record producer, and occasional drummer who is best known as a member of The Black Eyed Peas.

Allan Pineda Lindo, Jr. (born November 28, 1974) better known as apl.de.ap (pronounced "Apple D Ap"), is a Filipino-American rapper, record producer, and occasional drummer who is best known as a member of The Black Eyed Peas. EARLY LIFEApl.de.ap was born in Pampanga, Philippines, to a Filipino mother and an African American father. His father, an Airman stationed at Clark Air Base, ditched the family shortly after his birth; his mother, Cristina Pineda, raised him and his six younger siblings as a single mother. As a child, apl.de.ap would make an hour-long jeepney trip to and from school, and helped his family subsist by farming sweet potatoes, corn, sugar cane and rice. Citation needed The Pearl S. Buck Foundation, an organization that finds healthier living environments for young abandoned or orphaned American children, matched him with a sponsor named Joe Ben Hudgens through a dollar-a-day program. He initially came to the United States at the age of 11 to treat nystagmus, an involuntary movement of the eyes. During a trip to Disneyland, Apl expressed his interest in staying in the United States. 

It would take another three years for Hudgens to officially adopt him, but at fourteen he moved permanently to the United States to live with Hudgens.In Los Angeles, he attended John Marshall High School where he befriended William Adams (stage name will.i.am), the nephew of Hudgens' roommate. He went to college at Holy Angel University. Apl.de.ap's early musical influences were Stevie Wonder, The Eagles, The Beatles, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Leaders of the New School and the popular Filipino rock/folk group, Asin. Apl was introduced to hip-hop by break dancing. "I would take the jeepney all the way to Angeles City, and that's how I got introduced to break dancing," he said. "I would see kids at the corner break-dancing and I'm like, 'I wanna do that.'" apl.de.ap revealed to People Magazine in 2011 that he is legally blind in both of his eyes, suffering from nystagmus and has this condition his entire career. "I'm good at shapes. If I'm not close, even if it's big, I can't read it. I doubted myself for a long time," apl.de.ap said. "I'm comfortable not using my vision.

 I weave around my problems." He went on to say in the same article that "Until I discovered hip-hop, I felt I wasn't going to accomplish anything." Two of his siblings are dead: his younger brother Arnel committed suicide (this is referenced in The Apl Song in the lines "I guess sometimes life's stresses get you down/Oh brother, wish I could have helped you out"). His youngest brother, Joven Pineda Deala, was murdered at the age of 22 in February 2009 in Porac, Pampanga
I would like to thank kapampanganheroes.blogspot.com for the information for this posting.