Jeff Healey was a virtuoso electric guitarist who made his name leading the blues-rock trio that bore his name. Blind from shortly after birth, he played his guitar in novel fashion, seated with the instrument on his lap rather than slung round his neck. Later in his career he taught himself to play the trumpet and enjoyed a second career playing traditional jazz.

Born in 1966 in Toronto, he was adopted at birth and never knew who his parents were. Named Norman Jeffrey Healey by his foster parents, he lost his sight when he was only a few months old because of the rare eye cancer retinoblastoma. By the age of 3 he was taking his first steps on the guitar.

Too small to play the instrument in the conventional way, he coaxed notes out of the strings by playing the guitar flat on the floor and subsequently, stretched out on his knees. Necessity, as so often, became the mother of invention, and he used the technique all his life, later claiming it gave him greater flexibility in bending and hammering the strings.

By 6 he was performing in public and before his teens was playing in several bands. He also began collecting records, many of them rare vintage jazz and blues 78s. His collection ultimately ran to 25,000 discs and at the age of 14 he precociously landed a weekly show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation featuring selections from his library. He loved almost every kind of music but in his own guitar-playing the blues emerged as his preferred style. Among the first to recognise his talent was Albert Collins, one of blues music’s elder statesmen, who became his first champion and invited him to share the stage at a show in Toronto. Before he was out of his teens he had also played with Stevie Ray Vaughan and B. B. King.

By then he was already leading the band Blue Direction as guitarist and singer, playing mostly covers in bars around Toronto. On Sunday nights he joined the regular jam sessions at the city’s Grossman’s Tavern, where he met the drummer Tom Stephen and bassist Joe Rockman whom he recruited to form the Jeff Healey Band. Signed to Arista Records, the triomade its debut album, See The Light, in 1988. Mixing original songs and covers, a version of John Hiatt’s Angel Eyes gave them a Billboard Top 5 single, while a cover of Freddie King’s Hideaway was nominated for a Grammy as best instrumental. The album itself sold a million copies in the US and a further 300,000 in Canada, catapulting Healey within the space of a few months from playing clubs to selling out stadiums.

The album’s success also led to his appearance in the 1989 film Roadhouse, starring Patrick Swayze. His band travelled to Los Angeles to cut the film’s soundtrack with producer Jimmy Iovine. The following year Healey won the Entertainer of the Year award at the Junos, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys.

A second album, Hell to Pay, featured guest appearances by Mark Knopfler and George Harrison. It was followed in 1992 by Feel This and three years later came Cover to Cover, a collection of rock standards and blues classics that earned a second Grammy nomination. None of his subsequent albums, however, quite repeated the commercial success of the band’s debut and a five-year gap followed before Get Me Some in 2000.

During the lay-off Healey opened his own club in Toronto, where he played with a rock band on Thursday nights and with a jazz combo he dubbed Jeff Healey’s Jazz Wizards on Saturday afternoons. When he took up the trumpet, it was his jazz group that became the main focus of his musical activity: on the albums Among Friends (2002), Adventures in Jazzland (2004) and It’s Tight Like That (2006).

At the time of his death, Healey was about to release Mess of Blues, his first rock album in eight years and he was due to tour Britain and Europe next month. Unfortunately, the genetic mutation that had cost him his eyesight always carried with it the risk of secondary cancer, and in 2007 he underwent surgery to remove cancerous tissue from both his legs, and later from his lungs.

He died in hospital with his wife, Cristie, at his side, and is also survived by their two children.

Jeff Healey, guitarist, was born on March 25, 1966. He died of cancer on March 2, 2008, aged 41