LEFTY DIZZ (1937.04.29/Osceola, AK – 1993.09.07/Chicago, IL) started playing guitar at age 19 after a four-year hitch in the Air Force. Entirely self-taught, he played a standard right-handed model flipped upside down, without reversing the strings. His sound was raw and distorted and his style owed more to the older bluesmen than to the hipper West Side players like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy working in the B.B. King mode.

By the time he came to Chicago, he had honed his craft well enough to become a member of Junior Wells’s band in 1964, recording and touring Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia with him until the late ’60s. At various times during the ’60s and early ’70s, he’d also moonlight as a guitarist with Chicago stalwarts J.B. Lenoir and Hound Dog Taylor, while sitting in everywhere and playing with seemingly everyone. While being well known around town as a “head cutter,” Lefty Dizz was always welcome on anyone’s bandstand. His personality, while seemingly carefree and humorous, masked a deep, highly intelligent individual who had also earned a degree in economics from Southern Illinois University.

He kept soldiering on in the blues trenches through the ’90s when he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. While chemotherapy helped, Lefty went back to work far too soon and far too hard to stay on top of his game for much longer. The unflappable Dizz, who could seemingly make the best out of any given situation without complaint and had friends in the blues community by the truckload, finally passed away on September 7, 1993. And with his passing, the blues lost perhaps its most flamboyant showman. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.