The metal headband was tight. Painfully tight. To make things even more uncomfortable, there was a small plastic box attached and it was pressing just behind my right ear.
The doctor reached over and hit a switch on the box. I heard a loud beep and then I was suddenly thrust into what seemed like another world. The room, which had seemed so quiet a second before, was suddenly alive with sound. I could hear air rushing out of the vent over my head. I could hear people murmuring in the hallway. Footsteps. My own breath. The buzz from the fluorescent lighting suddenly caught my attention. Suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I heard my father’s voice.
“Can you hear me?”
For a moment I could not speak. I thought to myself, This is my father’s voice. Then a memory from childhood rushed back at me. I remembered being very young and being carried, half-asleep, by my father. He spoke something, gently — always gently. The voice rumbled through his chest and echoed into my head as he held me in his arms. I remembered thinking, This is my father’s voice.
“Yeah, Dad. I can hear you.”
I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. After so many years of near-silence, the sheer number of sounds I was experiencing just sitting in the exam room was almost too much to take in.
The doctor said something about scheduling the surgery, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy listening to all of the everyday background noise that normal people learn to tune out. My hand crept into my jacket pocket and I wrapped my fingers around my harmonica.
The doctor left the room for a moment. I brought out my harmonica. My hands were shaking. I brought the instrument to my mouth, paused for just a moment, and began to play my favorite song, "The Streets of Laredo."
As I walked down in the streets of Laredo
As I walked down in Laredo one day
I spied a cowpuncher, all wrapped in white linen
Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay.
The notes seemed impossibly loud. I ran through the song again, drinking in the sound of my harmonica. Even though I had never heard my harmonica this clearly, I am pretty good. I fluttered my hands over the harp to give it some vibrato and moved my tongue to change the flow of air over the reeds. Playing the harmonica is just like singing. As I played I could hear people in the hallway and the waiting room talking to each other, sounding pleasantly surprised. A few nurses and patients gathered outside the open exam room door.
“Is somebody playing a harmonica?”
“I know that song.”
“It’s been so long since I have heard that song. My father used to...”
I struggled to filter out the background noise and focused on the song. After a few more times through, I stopped and regretfully put the harmonica back in my pocket. “That was wonderful,” I sighed. I marveled for a second at the sound of my own voice.
I smiled at my dad. He grinned back at me.
“So, it works?”
“Yeah, Dad. It works. This is...”
“Amazing.”
“Yes.”
As the doctor came back into the room, I took off the headband. Suddenly the rush of sound was gone. Everything was quiet again.
I did not go deaf all at once. It happened slowly, one ear infection after another. My parents noticed that I was substituting sounds in my speech when I was a toddler. That prompted our first visit to an ear specialist. From that point on, my childhood was a seemingly endless cycle of pain, infection, and surgery — and each go-around brought the volume of my world down a notch. When my deafness started making it difficult to communicate, I simply adapted. It happened gradually. I started using body language and lip-reading to fill in the words that my ears missed. After a while, talking to another person required that I give them my complete attention. I had to take in as much data as I could see with my eyes and then use my intuition to fill in the blanks left by the words I could not hear. It was exhausting, but over time I was able to have a conversation without the other person noticing.
The desire for a better way to communicate led me to music. I saw music as a way to express emotions and feelings without words.
I started out with the harmonica. My mother gave me a shiny silver Hohner Marine Band harmonica as a Christmas gift. As I held the instrument in my hands, my mother told me that music was a language, and if I had music I would never be alone. Anywhere I went I made friends.
The harmonica led to the five-string banjo. My father taught me the old-time style of banjo playing where you strike down on the strings with your fingernail. This was perfect for me because banjos are naturally loud and the basics of old-time picking are so mechanical that I could play in jam sessions even when I could not hear my instrument.
I went anywhere and everywhere I could to play. I jammed with street musicians on the Atlantic City boardwalk, performed at festivals held on farms in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, and busked on Philadelphia subway platforms. I usually did not discuss my hearing with other musicians, but when I did they often told me about their own problems. Because of that, I never thought there was anything special about my hearing.
After playing the banjo for a while, I got it into my head that I wanted to play the guitar. My local NPR station has a folk music show on Sunday nights. I would sit with my head pressed against the speaker of my boom box radio. If I cranked up the volume I could make out melodies, but I just could not hear the bass. One night the folk show played a song by Mississippi John Hurt and I just about went crazy. The song started with John Hurt talking about coffee, and his voice had this rhythm to it that was so cool. Then he started playing. His guitar rang out with a sweet shuffle that took my breath away. I fell in love with the blues right then and there.
After that I did not just want to play, I needed to play the guitar. The only problem was that my hearing was so bad at this point that I couldn’t hear much of what I was doing. I would pick and strum as hard as I could and...nothing.
One night after trying for hours to make something happen on the guitar, I slouched over my metal-body Dobro 33H in despair. The guitar was a gift from my father. Fashioned from solid bell bronze, chrome-plated with an aluminum resonator cone under the strings to make it louder. My cheek was resting against the upper bout of the instrument. I strummed the strings in frustration and jumped in surprise when I realized I could hear and feel the sounds.
So I started practicing with my cheek resting on the guitar for a little while. After experimenting, I discovered that I could actually hear the instrument if I rested my teeth against the guitar body. I learned to play the guitar through bone conduction. When I rested my teeth on the instrument, sound waves were able to travel through my skull to the auditory nerves. I did not know the science behind what I was doing. I just knew it worked.
I played that way for years: hunched over my guitar using my teeth to hear what I was playing through bone conduction. I got pretty good at it too. When we played a show or went to a jam session, I would have to be discreet about it or risk people thinking I was gnawing on my guitar like a dog with a bone. Once I started seeing and understanding the logic of music, I could go for long stretches playing on instinct, just using my teeth to hear the guitar as a reference.
After a few years of playing like this, I realized that because I had had such a hard time learning my craft, I wanted to make it easier for others. I started teaching music online using an open-source business structure, making my books freely available. Profit comes from hard-copy sales of my music books and videos. After a few years I had students all over the world and was able to purchase health insurance. In folk music, getting to the point where you have health insurance is the equivalent of hitting the big time.
My impaired hearing may have actually made me a better teacher. I had practiced speaking clearly for so long that it was easy to present ideas to the camera. Best of all, whenever somebody would complain that learning music was hard, I would happily point out my deafness. That always cut through the excuses and got people willing to pick themselves up and try again.
In 2009, after 20 years of making music without really being able to hear, I was at Johns Hopkins and the doctors were strapping that box attached to a metal band around my head.
The doctors performed the surgery a few weeks later. I had to wait three months for the skin and bone to heal around the titanium screw before the sound processor could be attached. My online students sent cards and letters of support. Several artists from around the world donated custom prints of their work for us to sell to raise funds to help cover the medical costs not covered by insurance.
After a few weeks, it was time to go back to Johns Hopkins to attach the sound processor. The audiologist went over how to use the device and how to attach it to the post sticking out of my head. Once it was programmed and activated, I was shocked at how much clearer the sound was than when we tested the device with a headband.
Just like before, the world rushed in on me. I was surrounded by sound. I heard my father’s voice.
Then I picked up my guitar.
Hearing my guitar after so many years playing by feel and instinct was overwhelming. Bright notes jumped at me and seemed to dance around the room. I struggled to maintain my composure, but inside my heart was beating a mile a minute. It had worked. I could hear. Not only that, I really was a pretty good guitar player; up until that moment I was still just a little unsure that my approach to country blues guitar was really working.
After leaving the audiologist, my father and I went down to the cafeteria. I was almost dizzy from all of the new sounds I was experiencing. As we sat at the table I could hear a conversation, and it was really distracting until I realized I was overhearing three women gossiping on the other side of the room. I told my dad excitedly that I was eavesdropping for the very first time. My dad walked over to the ladies and explained to them that I was deaf and, because of my bone-anchored hearing aid (BAHA) implant, was able to overhear their conversation. The women actually jumped for joy, threw up their arms, and started praising God.
Life with the BAHA implant has been different and the same all at once. I am still a musician and I am still dedicated to sharing my craft with anybody who desires to make music. But being able to hear has widened my world a great deal. I met Amy at a banjo retreat in Crisfield, Maryland. She saw one of my workshops online and decided that she wanted to meet me. Once I could hear, my friends encouraged me to ask her out. After a whirlwind courtship, we were married on Oct. 10, 2010.
Months before I proposed, I wrote a waltz on the banjo for Amy. After working on it for a few days I finally got the nerve to play it for her. A few measures in, her face lit up and she said, “That’s mine!” She knew it was her song and she knew what I was saying to her through the music.
In 2013 I had a second BAHA implant installed over my left ear at Johns Hopkins. After I healed up for a few months, the second device was attached, and I can now hear in stereo. A few of my students showed up at Johns Hopkins with banjos. Amy held me close while my father and the gang serenaded us.
My hearing is far from perfect. I still need to use closed captions while watching movies or television. I was thrilled when movie theaters started offering closed-caption glasses. They display the captions through a heads-up display so I can take my wife to see a film and actually understand the dialogue.
I can’t wear the BAHA at night, so my wife and I developed our own private language of touch so we can talk in the dark. Little sequences of gentle taps and caresses to say things like “I love you.”
Talking on the phone is still ridiculously difficult. Even if I can hear the words, I am so used to being dependent on visual cues that voices over the telephone are incomprehensible. I honestly find it a little terrifying, and that drives my wife crazy because she ends up having to make calls to schedule doctor appointments and other things that I would otherwise just leave undone to avoid the telephone.
I love the sound of everyday things. Water running from the faucet. Coffee gurgling in the little Moka pot in our kitchen. Rain. I love rain, and thunderstorms. I love the low rumble of thunder and the sharp crack of lightning. Autumn leaves crinkling under my feet as I walk through the woods. Even the whine of mosquitoes buzzing by my BAHA fills me with delight.
One cool new feature of the BAHA sound processor is a Bluetooth attachment that sends audio from an MP3 player to my sound processors. I love rocking out with Dave Grohl or Henry Rollins blasting directly into my skull.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “The Pastoral,” is something that I love to listen to with my BAHA. Having an orchestra blast directly into your skull is an awe-inspiring experience. It never gets old. I love the Sixth Symphony because it sounds like Beethoven was trying to express his love of walking in the woods through music. This rich and lush piece of music captures some of the emotions I feel when I walk along the banks of the Chesapeake Bay under the bright sun shining in God’s blue sky.
Sometimes I turn off the BAHA. When I do, the world goes back to the way I knew it for so long. I will pick up my guitar, rest my teeth on the upper bout, and play the way I did for more than 20 years.
I don’t do this to retreat — although that is tempting on days when I feel overwhelmed by the world. No, I do it to remind myself of how far I have come. I do not ever want to take this gift of hearing for granted. I am aware that every day I can hear the birds, my wife’s voice, my guitar ringing out, and all of the other everyday sounds that surround me, is precious.
Sometimes people who know my story will say something about how unfair it is for a musician to lose his hearing. How could God do something like that? I try to explain to them that I never saw my hearing loss as a bad thing. It happened, and, yes, some things were harder because of it. But learning to make music around what appeared to be a disability only made me appreciate it more. Struggling to communicate taught me the value of a simple conversation. Look at my life now. I have a beautiful wife. I have an amazing family. I have music. I have students and friends all over the world. I would not change a thing.