My post on mixed handedness generated a lot of interest, and I said I’d return to that topic after I had learned more about it. It turns out there was far too much information to put into a post, or even a series of posts. So I’ll be releasing it as an ebook in the near future.

One thing that surprised me was how astonishingly hard it is to get reliable information on whether certain famous people are left-handed, right-handed, or mixed-handed.

What often happens is someone hears that so-and-so is left-handed, so he puts that in a book without checking for any evidence, and before too long it ends up on a million web pages. It’s kind of annoying when you’re just trying to find the truth.

Here we see 6 famous people who regularly appear on lists of southpaws, despite the notable distinction of not being left-handed. (Thanks to Chris McManus for bringing these people to my attention in his book Right Hand, Left Hand.)

Billy the Kid

First on the list is Henry McCarty, AKA Henry Antrim, AKA William H. Bonney, AKA Billy the Kid. He’s been the most famous southpaw outlaw since Paul Newman played him in the 1958 western “The Left Handed Gun.”

It’s actually understandable that we always thought he was left-handed. After all, we only had one photograph of him, and it showed him with a pistol on his left hip, steadying a rifle with his right hand.

The problem is that we only had blurry copies of the original photo. After discovering the original more than 100 years after his death, we found that it was made using a technique that reversed the image.

Furthermore, the original was clear enough that we could see that the buttons were on the wrong side of his vest, and his belt buckle was backwards. The corrected version appears above, showing Billy’s pistol on his right hip.

Pablo Picasso

We only had one picture of Billy the Kid, but we don’t have that problem with Picasso. Actually, we have thousands of pictures of Picasso, and plenty of videos as well. The only problem is, he isn’t using his left hand in any of them.

Albert Einstein

You’ve probably seen this picture before, with Einstein writing on the chalkboard right-handed. He may very well have been mixed-handed, but he sure wasn’t left-handed.

James Michener

Pulitzer Prize winner James Michener was once nominated by Southpaws International as one of their southpaws of the year. He wrote to them to say that the only thing he used his left hand for was occasionally scratching his right elbow.

Bob Dylan

If Bob Dylan were completely left-handed, you’d think it would be easy to find a picture of him playing a guitar that way.

However, he may have been mixed-handed. In David Hepworth’s 1986 interview with Bob Dylan, Hepworth noted that Dylan autographed his album with his left hand.

Benjamin Franklin

The confusion here comes from Benjamin Franklin’s essay a petition of the left hand. It’s written from the point of view of a left hand, complaining about how he’s treated differently from the right hand. But is that enough to mean that Ben was left-handed?

The portrait above was painted by Mason Chamberlin, from life (i.e., in person) in 1762. Ben Franklin is shown holding a quill pen in his right hand. I have to think that the artist wouldn’t go to the trouble of reversing the image since the model was right in front of him, and Ben would surely have noticed had he done so.

At any rate, there are many possibilities between completely left-handed and completely right-handed. Take this handedness test to see where you fall on that continuum.

Do you know any other right-handed “southpaws?”

For more handedness myth-busting, check out my ebooks Ambidextrous (for right-handers) and Ambisinistrous (for left-handers).