Nicky Roberts wasn’t born blind. Retinitis pigmentosa began to take effect around his twentieth birthday, leaving him sightless by 25. But as his vision ebbed, his mastery of the guitar grew. “I’ve played a guitar since I was four. At five I performed at a wedding and $25—my first professional earnings,” Roberts told the New York World Telegram. That confidence propelled this son of a Brooklyn barber through his unexpected condition. “My father was fiercely independent,” said daughter Laura King. “He never let being blind keep him from accomplishing what he set his mind to.”

In the early ‘50s he formed the first incarnation of the Three Bars, with Murray Gropper on piano and Frank Darling on drums. The trio quickly signed to the Fiesta label of New York, founded by Jose Morand in 1952 and strictly focused on Latin music. The Three Bars cut four mambo sides for Fiesta, and four more for RCA Victor Canada before the decade was up. The real money, though, was in the live show, with the trio bouncing between the London Room at Idlewild Airport’s Seaway Idlewild Hotel and the Sands in Vegas (which led to Roberts’ uncredited appearance in Ocean’s Eleven in 1960).

In 1960, with a child on the way, the 41-year-old Roberts was ready to move out of his parents’ Gravesend, Brooklyn home and settle down with singer Bonnie King. He signed on with songwriter Jimmy Nebb’s Regalia/Cinema/Armour cluster of labels, and began tracking his debut album with a new trio—Tony Teller on bass, Bobby Nelson on drums. The Latinesque The Sensitive Touch (1962) combines Roberts originals and wild rearrangements of out-of-vogue standards. The jacket features snaps of Roberts with Sammy Davis, Johnny Carson, and Milton Berle, and quotes from Robert Ripley and Ed Sullivan. How the LP performed in the marketplace is unknown, but The Sensitive Touch would be the last record from Regalia for a decade. Nebb shifted the Three Bars to Armour, who issued the group’s final single in 1963. With its wordless chorus and Afro-inspired rhythms, “Caribbean Cruise” was a reworked exotica version of “Arcara Joe” from The Sensitive Touch, with extra room for Roberts to show off what he could do with his custom D’angelico guitar.

The balance of Roberts’ ’60s recording career was spent backing his wife Bonnie King, but he reappeared for the couple’s 1973 Evangelist Streams of Living Music album. Roberts spent much of the last two decades of his life on Long Island, playing golf. “Golf is a game that should be played with the mind as much as the eyes. I play my game with my head. Someone leads me up to the tee, tells me the layout of the fairway and directs me,” Roberts said. “I do the rest.”