Hearing-impaired musician makes moving return to stage with Vince Gill & the Time Jumpers

During his February 2 concert in Nashville, country superstar Vince Gill invited Joe Hannigan to join him and his band, the Time Jumpers, on stage.

"I wanted to prove to myself, that my music career wasn’t over," Hannigan wrote on Facebook after the show. "I think I did it! Thank you everyone for all your support."

In 2012, Hannigan, a musician, was diagnosed with Superior Canal Dehiscence Syndrome (SCBS), which left him virtually deaf.

A surgical procedure promising to fix the problem only made it worse. As a result of the surgery, he’d officially lost the hearing in his left ear.

“And as bad as that was, I still had probably 80% hearing in my right ear, but if you know what tinnitus is, some people have a ringing and so forth, but for me it was like a roaring, almost like a loud hair dryer in my dead ear," he told Saving Country Music. "It became so loud 24 hours a day that I could not hear out of my good ear anymore because of the tinnitus. My bad ear went so mad that it was creating this false sense of loud noise that it was blocking the sound out of my good ear.”

Along with his hearing loss and tinnitus, Hannigan’s balance was off. The room was constantly spinning and he was forced to learn to walk again.

“I wanted to throw all of my guitars away. It was the most depressing time,” Hannigan said. “Being told I was going to be deaf, it was probably the worst 6-8 months of my life. It’s like an artist going blind. It was like a gunshot. I’d been playing music since I was eight years old.”

He’s now on the slow road to recovery, thanks to a Cochlear implant which helps balance out sounds with his good ear, what Hannigan called “an effective fix for the tinnitus.”

“Instantly when they turned it on, the tinnitus went away,” said Hannigan. “And then I started to be able to hear back in my normal ear better again.”

Still, the road to recovery will be a long one. Because Hannigan is one of the few people with a Cochlear implant and a good ear — doctors had to fight for Hannigan to be eligible for the surgery, as Cochlear implants usually require deafness in both ears — he’s part of a research study determined to improve the technology of the implant.

While his hearing isn’t perfect, it's constantly improving.

“Now that it’s been a year, my brain is starting to take the two different sounds and meld them together,” he said. “But to this day, if I take off my implant, the tinnitus starts back instantly, and I virtually cannot hear anything.”

Hannigan recently posted a note to Gill’s band through the Time Jumper’s website, sharing his story and mentioning that he’d love the chance to play with them at an upcoming show. 

“I’ve seen the Time Jumpers a few times and seen them with guests, and I’ve thought to myself, ‘Man, I would like to do that,’” Hannigan told Saving Country Music. “And then I heard Vince do a couple of my favourite songs and there was nobody in the band doing harmony with him. So I went to the Time Jumpers web page and wrote them a little letter just telling them about my experience and that I’d love to be able to have a chance to sit in, and I’d say that within 45 minutes I got a response back, and eventually everybody in the band say ‘yes.'”

Gill and the band invited Hannigan to join them on stage for the song “When I Call You Name.” Hannigan played the guitar and sang harmony.

“I got to say, Vince and the rest of the guys in the band were so nice to me,” Hannigan said. “Vince even made a joke at the end of it when I was leaving, and he said, ‘We got to get those for everyone else in the band because you sing better than the rest of these guys.’”