Django Reinhardt played his guitar solos with two fingers

On the night of November 2, 1928, Django Reinhardt was going to bed in the caravan wagon he shared with his wife. He knocked over a candle. His wife made artificial flowers out of celluloid, which burns very easily, and the wagon went up in flames. They both got out, but he was burned over half his body.

He was 18, and his career had just started. That year he made his first records, on banjo-guitar behind accordion players. The British bandleader Jack Hylton had come to France to hear him and offered him a job, and Reinhardt had said yes. He never got to start it.

He spent 18 months in the hospital. Doctors wanted to amputate his right leg, and he refused. He later walked with a cane. The ring and little fingers of his left hand, the hand that presses the strings, were badly burned, and the doctors believed he would never play guitar again.

His brother Joseph bought him a new six-string guitar, and he taught himself to play it again. For melody he used his index and middle fingers. The two damaged fingers could still hold down a high string in a chord, though he could not move them separately. He played entirely by ear and could not read music.

Most of his chords used just three notes, and each shape could stand in for several ordinary chords. For fast runs he played two notes on a string and then slid up or down the neck, instead of moving across the strings in one place. Players of the style that grew from his music still use those patterns.

In the years after the fire, an acquaintance named Émile Savitry introduced him to American jazz through records by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the guitarist Eddie Lang. He decided to become a jazz musician. In 1934 he and the violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France in Paris. In 1946 he toured the United States with Duke Ellington's orchestra.

Decades later in England, a 17-year-old named Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers on his fretting hand on his last day at a sheet metal factory. His foreman played him a Django Reinhardt record and told him the guitarist was using two fingers because of a fire. Iommi took up the guitar again. He made himself new fingertips from a melted dish soap bottle and went on to co-found Black Sabbath.