Paul pena biography

1950–2005

Singer, guitarist

It is a tired cliché to call a comeback musician's career a rollercoaster ride. In Paul Pena's case, however, there is no better way to describe it. The talented blues singer/guitarist/songwriter sank from the brink of stardom to the depths of depression and obscurity, before re-emerging into the limelight more than two decades later as the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary detailing his unlikely mastery of a strange and beautiful musical technique practiced halfway around the world.

Paul Pena was born on January 26, 1950, in Hyannis, a town on Massachusetts' Cape Cod peninsula. He was the oldest child of Jack and Virginia Pena. Pena's grandparents were immigrants from another "Cape"—Cape Verde, an island nation about 400 miles off the coast of Senegal in Western Africa. Born with congenital glaucoma, Pena was blind from birth. At age five, he enrolled in the Perkins School for the Blind in Water-town, Massachusetts, a suburb o