Dusty Spittle, a New Zealand music legend, taught a songwriting class during the first day of the Old Time Country and Bluegrass Music Festival which runs all week at the Plymouth County Fairgrounds. [Click to enlarge]

Dusty Spittle was born without one.

On his right side, the New Zealand man doesn't have an eardrum, and his right "ear" is actually a skin graft from his shoulder.

But that didn't stop him from writing and performing music, rising to be a New Zealand star in the old time country music scene.

Monday, with strains of "I'll Fly Away Oh Glory" wafting in, the wizened musician led a workshop on songwriting at the Plymouth County Fairgrounds.

It was day one of the Old Time Country and Bluegrass Music Festival.

All around the fairgrounds, campers are parked side by side, and musicians holding fiddles, string basses and steel guitars were walking about and greeting each other like this was all a family reunion.

A few wandered in to hear Spittle give some tips. He's recorded several old time country albums of his own.

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Dusty's name isn't actually Dusty.

At his birth in 1939, he was given the name Harold Ian Spittle, but went by Ian as a boy.

At the age of 9, his dad brought him to hear Tex Morton, one of New Zealand's early old time country singers.

"I never really got over it," Spittle said in his gravely voice, thick with a New Zealand accent. "My mother was real against me getting into music, though."

But by the age of 16, he bought his first guitar. And by 25, he was traveling the Australia-Tasmania music circuit.

One day a disc jockey told him, "You haven't got a very country name."

"My mom had a flower I liked called the 'Dusty Miller,'" Spittle said.

So "Dusty" it was.

At first Spittle played other people's songs, but then he met a lady picking beans who asked him to put her poem to a tune. He said he didn't think he knew how, but she said, "I think you can."

He decided to try.

"I read her poem through and figured I'd see a tune," Spittle said.

The English language rises and falls as you speak it, he explained.

And that's how his songwriting career began.

"Probably the hardest part of writing a song is getting the original inspiration to do it," he said. "I write about something I know about."

For Spittle, that meant writing songs about a waltz he remembered from dances as a teenager, about life on his farm in New Zealand, and about an old cowboy he met complaining about the "young bucks" who don't know how to work hard.

"It was just a story put to rhyme," he said. "That's what I like about country music -- there's a story to it."

Spittle encouraged musicians at the songwriting workshop to get their songs registered and copyrighted, then try to find music companies interested in publishing them.

He'll be playing his songs all week long at the music festival at the fairgrounds.

But he says he hasn't seen a lot of payback on the songs he's written.

"I don't know who's got my money," he laughed, strumming the 12-string guitar on his lap. "It's not lucrative. I only do it because I love doing it."

Spittle's grin is crooked -- he had a cyst on his brain removed, leaving his face half paralyzed.

He was shy about it, until he met an author writing a book about country music. She asked to take his picture, and he shared his shyness of his crooked smile.

"She told me, 'That's your trademark,'" Spittle said. "I like that."

And as for having one ear, Spittle said it doesn't seem to be a disadvantage.

"I can actually sing better," he smiled.