CeDell Davis (born Ellis Davis) is a blues guitarist and vocalist. Blues is a vocal and instrumental musical form which evolved from African American spirituals, shouts, work songs and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

Davis is most notable for his distinctive style of guitar playing. Davis plays guitar using a table knife in his fretting hand in a manner similar to slide guitar, resulting in a welter of metal-stress harmonic transients and a singular tonal plasticity. He uses this style out of necessity. When he was 10, he suffered from severe polio which left him little control over his left hand and restricted use of his right. He had been playing guitar prior to his polio and decided to continue in spite of his handicaps and thus developed his knife method as the only way he could come up with of still playing guitar with his limited use of his hands. Example of a bottleneck, with fingerpicks and resonator guitar. ... Look up plasticity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Poliomyelitis (polio), or infantile paralysis, is a viral paralytic disease. ...

Davis was born on June 9, 1927 in Helena, Arkansas where his family worked on a local plantation. He enjoyed music from a young age, playing harmonica and guitar with his childhood friends. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Helena-West Helena, Arkansas. ...

Once he sufficiently mastered his variation on slide guitar playing, CeDell Davis began playing in various nightclubs and dives across the Delta area. He played with the great slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk for a ten-year period from 1953-1963. While playing in a club in 1957, a police raid caused the crowd to stampede over Davis. Both of his legs were broken rather severely in this incident and he was forced to use a wheelchair from then on. The hardships resulting from his physical handicaps were a major influence in his lyrics and style of blues playing. Robert Lee McCollum (30 November 1909–5 November 1967) was an American bluesman who played and recorded under the names Robert Lee McCoy and Robert Nighthawk. ... A wheelchair is a wheeled mobility device in which the user sits. ...

In recent times, Davis' music has been released by the Fat Possum record label to much critical acclaim. His 1994 album, "Feel Like Doin' Something Wrong", received a 9.0 from Pitchfork Media who called it "timeless." A typical example of Pitchforks main page, as of 12-12-06 Pitchfork Media, usually known simply as Pitchfork and occasionally shortened to P4K, pitchy, or pfork,[1] is a United States-based daily Internet publication devoted to music criticism and commentary, music news, and artist interviews. ...