[The
Ballad of Blind Tom, Slave Pianist: America's Lost Musical Genius;
Deirdre O’Connell; Overlook Press (2009)]
This is the third instalment of
Africlassical’s excerpts from the Ballad of Blind Tom, Deirdre
O'Connell’s biography about 19th century pianist
and autistic savant, “Blind Tom” Wiggins. Her website is BlindTom.org:
I’LL
DO YOUR TOPLEY
From
the time he was young, Blind Tom showed a profound and highly
idiosyncratic aptitude for language. His master’s
nephew remembers that he “had
the loveliest of visions, almost like poems but in his later years
were loaded with peculiarities.” A few of these ‘poems’ survive
in the form of his Vocal Compositions,
published when he was seventeen and through
pieces like The Man Who Snatched The
Cornet Out of His Hands we can begin to
fathom the mysterious gap between what made sense to Tom and what
makes sense to the rest of us.
Tell him to
come up/I’ll do your Topley/Don’t be uneasy/Until I see you.
Now he has
gone up/Into his mason/Now you had hurt/Your Topley last night
Now comes the
tutti/Don’t be in a hurry/Now I will have your/Band for to play me.
One man had
come up/And bought his cymbals/And snatched his cornet/
Out of his
hands.
At
first glance, it is a nonsense although not an entire nonsense. The
syntax holds, however simply, and the rhythm fits the eight line
verse in 6/8 time. And while most individual lines make some kind of
sense, the logic between one line and the next is less so. Most
intriguing is Tom’s use of the words ‘Topley’,
‘tutti’ and ‘mason’.
‘Tutti’ – a musical
term denoting ‘all together’ – is
used in an appropriate, though unconventional, way. ‘Mason’ could
be anything from a reference to the pianist William Mason, the
secretive order, a tradesman, or even a phonics deviation of
‘mansion’ leaving ‘Topley’
as the only truly unfathomable word in
Tom’s private lexicon. This poem was based on an actual occurrence
experienced by Tom and perhaps, by random
association, the meaning of ‘Topley’ became
forever fixed in his mind.
Audiences
who were captivated by the unexpected twists and turns of Tom’s
paradoxical mind seemed to suffer from a weak information processing
system of their own, refusing to integrate his myriad of talents into
a meaningful whole. As far as they were concerned Blind Tom had a
single gift that spontaneously arose and would never change. But
Tom encapsulated the American experience more than they could ever
imagine. Like him, the country was teetering on the verge of
disintegration, the Union of States poised to shatter into a
collection of disparate pieces. In the propaganda wars between
abolition and slavery, Tom was both an instrument and cause
celebre, a cipher of the new explosive
acoustic landscape and an enduring symbol of the old.
No comments:
Post a Comment