A heart emergency nearly 20 years ago took away the one thing John Raido built his identity around: his ability to play guitar. Today, performing as Foggy Otis out of Orange, Connecticut, he is releasing a deluxe album through a Massachusetts record label and teaching ukulele to seniors across the state, all because a toy instrument turned out to be easier on his damaged hand than the guitar he had played since 1988.
A Heart Crisis That Changed Everything
Otis was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2008, according to an account he gave to jimtestanj.substack.com. He said he spent four weeks in the hospital that year with his heart functioning at only 13 percent of capacity. Four days after surgery, while in the intensive care unit, Otis flatlined, the same outlet reported in a separate piece describing him as “the longtime Jersey scene fixture” who flatlined nearly 20 years ago. As part of the operation, surgeons removed an artery from his left wrist to use in his heart, Otis told mundanemag.com in a separate interview.
The physical toll on his hand was immediate and lasting. Otis said the surgery left him with numbness and that he lost the dexterity needed to fret a guitar properly, calling the resulting pain and frustration a turning point in his musical life. “The numbness and pain made it impossible for me to play guitar anymore,” he said, per the same Substack account. Medical literature on radial-artery harvesting for bypass surgery has documented numbness and other neurologic complications in some patients, including a 2005 study in the journal reviewed on academic.oup.com that found sensation abnormalities, such as paresthesia and numbness, in 28 percent of patients studied — though that research does not establish what caused Otis's own symptoms.
Finding a New Instrument in an Unlikely Place
Rather than give up music, Otis turned to the ukulele, drawn to its nylon strings and four-string simplicity after years of six-string guitar work. “The nylon strings were easier on my hands and there were only four strings instead of six,” he told mundanemag.com. He taught himself by rearranging classic rock songs for ukulele and voice, a process that at one point consumed roughly 90 hours as he reworked Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody” for the small instrument, according to the same interview.
That self-taught reinvention eventually produced original material. As reported by the Hartford Courant, Otis worked as a public high school mathematics teacher in New Jersey before retiring from that career in February 2013, and he has described his current musical direction as folk singer-songwriter work with a pop influence, rooted in what one reviewer called a rootsy Americana lane with a nod to the Great American Songbook, per jimtestanj.substack.com.
A Record Deal Built on a Contest Entry
Otis's path to Verdict Music, an independent label, began with a contest. “It actually started with a contest they were running last year,” he told mundanemag.com, explaining that the label was soliciting covers of John Davidson's song “Rhinestone Pink Guitar.” Verdict Music ended up releasing his version of that song as a single, the same interview noted.
Otis sent the label his album, titled When Life Hands You Lemons, Play the Ukulele, according to the Hartford Courant's reporting, and the expanded album was re-released on July 16, 2026. That deluxe version, the jimtestanj.substack.com account reports, adds eight tracks to the originally self-released 10-song set and includes a remaster by Rob Fraboni using a process called “RealFeel.”
Teaching Ukulele to Connecticut Seniors
Beyond his own performing, Otis has built a teaching practice around the instrument that remade his career. He offers private ukulele lessons in Connecticut along with group classes at the Milford and Orange senior centers, he told jimtestanj.substack.com.
Otis has said that despite everything the health scare cost him, he would not change the experience, since it led him to the life he has now, according to the Hartford Courant. For a musician who once thought his guitar-playing days were simply over, the ukulele turned out to be the instrument that kept him on stage.
