Bruce Langhorne:

Hot-sauce muso who inspired Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’

BRUCE Langhorne, who has died at the age of 78, was a guitarist, percussionist, acclaimed composer of film scores, and creator of what many consider to be the world’s finest chilli sauce.

Bob Dylan was inspired to write the 1965 song Mr Tambourine Man after he saw Langhorne at a party playing a metre-wide Turkish tambourine.

Langhorne collaborated with Dylan and played guitar on many of the singer’s greatest recordings, notably on every track on the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home.

His creative virtuosity as a guitarist was especially remarkable given that the thumb, index and middle fingers of his right hand were reduced to stumps — the legacy of his ballistics experiment at the age of 12.

Langhorne was born in Tallahassee, Florida, on May 11 1938. His parents separated when he was four, and his mother took him to New York, where she raised him alone.

He began playing the guitar at the age of 17. “I had to play with two fingers and the nub of a third. Which meant that I had to strike two notes with one finger. So I developed a technique that used each of my fingers to generate a harmonic line,” he said.

Together with Dylan, Joan Baez and others, Langhorne performed at Martin Luther King jnr’s March on Washington in 1963. He was one of the few black performers to have dedicated himself to folk music at that time.

His film credits included the scores for The Hired Hand, Fighting Mad and Melvin and Howard.

In later life, in an attempt to enliven the diet his diabetes imposed on him, he cooked up Brother Bru Bru’s African Hot Sauce, recently acclaimed by GQ magazine as the best on the market.

His edition of Dylan’s Chronicles, which Langhorne kept on his livingroom table, bore the inscription: “Back then it was better to be in chains with friends than in a garden with strangers. So true, huh? From Bob Dylan to Bruce — Mr Tambourine Man.” —