Leo Kottke is a lucky man, and he’ll be among the first to admit it. The Grammy-nominated folk singer-songwriter and guitar legend is fortunate to be where he is today.

After losing part of his hearing in an accident while serving on a Navy submarine, he headed off to give college a try. That didn’t last too long, he says.

“I had a feud with a graduate class professor,” Kottke says. “Also, I was just playing more and more. I wasn’t traveling yet to play for a living but a record I had made had just come out.

“I had to decide whether I wanted to be picked on by an asshole or go out and have a different kind of life.”

Kottke elected to live on the road to play his music professionally. But life away from academia didn’t get any easier.

“So I took off, got robbed, lost all my money, knocked up my wife, went broke, moved to Pasadena and had to get a deal and an agent. I was kind of forced into this job,” he jokes. “What a terrible story.”

Despite all of the hardships, Kottke is very grateful his life has been as blessed as it is.

“This couldn’t be better,” he says.

But the story doesn’t quite end here. After Kottke had released a number of albums to critical and fan acclaim, destiny had a few more hurdles for him to jump through.

Kottke suffered a debilitating case of tendinitis, a guitar player’s nightmare — especially for a guitar player known for a fast and hard style of fingerpicking. But he says that wasn’t necessarily what caused his problems.

“It happened all at once,” he says. “I was playing somewhere and all of the sudden I couldn’t play. It wasn’t my style, it was my ineptitude.

“I just had crummy technique as a player. You really have to pay attention, no matter what your instrument is, so you don’t force your body or your embouchure — whatever you’re depending on — into a screwy geometry.”

Kottke says he wasn’t necessarily concerned that his livelihood was at risk. It was more of a concern that he might lose the ability to play his guitar that had brought him so much pleasure over the years.

“The threat for me had never been that I couldn’t work again,” he says. “The fear is that you won’t get to play again. It’s very unnerving.”

But Kottke refused to let his situation stop him from playing.

“For about three years, I sucked,” he says. “I was horrible.”

Through a few life lessons and sheer determination, Kottke reinvented himself and became an even better player than before.

“In the long run, my playing improved tremendously from what it was when I could still play in the old way,” he says. “I’m actually grateful for it. But getting through those three or four years was the toughest thing I’d ever done.”

One might think Kottke’s audience diminished while he struggled to find himself again. Even though many folk fans have been known to be fiercely devoted, how long can you expect them to hang on to hope?

But Kottke says his devotees, whom he describes as “all ages and all tastes,” stuck by him all the while.

Perhaps this is a tribute to the “strange diversity” among the crowd of typical Kottke fans.

“When you listen to music, you assume people like you are listening. It can be really weird to find that people unlike you are also listening,” he says. “I think in the course of the night, you find everybody’s pretty much in common. Or, we could say, in concert.”

Though the years haven’t exactly been kind in many ways, Kottke still loves to get out there and play for people. He says he’s glad the profession chose him.

“People ask me all the time how to do this and how to make a living at it,” he says. “Just by the question alone, you know they’re never going to make a living. Nobody I know who does ever intended to.

“Everybody has a different story about how they got into it — that turned out to be mine.”

Who: Leo Kottke

Where: Ames City Auditorium, 515 Clark Avenue

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Cost: $20