Erxian player, Chaozhou, 1990.

Blind musicians have long been major transmitters of traditional culture: do click away on this list of some posts featuring them.

For China—mainly shawm players and bards (passing quickly over the “usual suspects”, the ancient Master Kuang and the ubiquitous Abing):

• Walking shrill—general introduction to shawm bands
• Blind shawm players of Yanggao, and their
• secret language
• Shaanbei: the work of Guo Yuhua, with sequel:
• Bards of Shaanbei
• Shadow-puppetters of Gansu
• For an itinerant singer blinded in maturity, see Xu Tong: subaltern lives
• Under New musics in Beijing, blind singer Zhou Yunpeng
• The blind retainers of the Qing courtly elite
• The Shandong master Wang Dianyu
• the storytelling session in Blind well
• Cantonese storyteller Dou Wun (here and here),

as well as my first two posts on Coronavirus:

• blind bards of Shanxi
• morality tales of Gansu (more here).

Bards of Shaanbei https://stephenjones.blog/2018/06/23/bards-of-shaanbei/

For blind musicians elsewhere:

• Blind minstrels of Ukraine
• The Armenian oud-player Udi Hrant
• The Alevi bard Aşik Veysel (here, here, here)
• Dona Rosa in Lisbon
• Roland Kirk, among many fine jazz musicians
• Blind accordionist Muammer Ketencoğlu
• Ray Charles.

Indeed, one could greatly augment the list for many other cultures around the world. See also the celebrated blind musician Ajo Namgyal (1894–1942) in pre-occupation Tibet.