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Every once in a while some self taught musician comes along with an entirely different way of doing things and manages to make something of it. Kenneth Ray Carllile is one of those. He taught himself to play the dobro, starting at the age of eight, when his sister won one from some kind of sales promotion. Said sister got mad and hid the slide so little Kenny learned to play it with his thumb. Carllile became a professional guitarist but he played his guitar lying flat in his lap and fingered the strings with his left thumb and fingers, pressing down n them like typewriter keys.

There are only a couple of clips available of Thumbs Carllile playing, although there are several recordings floating around the internet, some of them very sophisticated arrangements of jazz standards. Here is one of him playing in the house band on the television show “Ozark Jubilee.” It appears that Richard Nixon is playing drums.

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