[The
Ballad of Blind Tom, Slave Pianist: America's Lost Musical Genius;
Deirdre O’Connell; Overlook Press (2009)]
AfriClassical
is pleased to welcome Deirdre O'Connell, whose website is BlindTom.org, as a Guest Blogger on Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins. He is profiled at AfriClassical.com, which features a comprehensive Works List by Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma, www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com:
For
the next six months, Africlassical is featuring excerpts from the
Ballad of Blind Tom, Deirdre O'Connell’s biography about 19th
century pianist and autistic savant, “Blind Tom” Wiggins.
Wiggins
was born a slave in Columbus, Georgia in 1849. His master, unprepared
to feed and clothe a blind “useless burden”, promptly sold Tom,
his parents and two sisters to a neighbor, General James Bethune.
Tom’s mother did her utmost to keep Tom out of Bethune’s sight,
aware that a peculiar fascination with sound and music also set him
apart.
The
Ballad of Blind Tom.
Excerpt
from Chapter 4, Unwritten Legend.
In
1853, the Bethunes purchased a piano and, from the moment it first
sounded, Tom was drawn to the Big House. The tone of the hammers
striking the strings had a ‘peculiar and most remarkable effect on
him’, recalled one of the Bethune lads. ‘At first he stood
spellbound, then his eyes began to roll, his fingers to twitch and
his body to sway back and forth when suddenly he convulsed with
emotion and the contortions of his body was something painful to
behold.’ The introduction was not complete before he was permitted
to touch and smell each key – his nose as important as his fingers
in discerning this musical elephant. And then he was removed from the
room and his re-entry blocked. Barred from the house, he took up
unofficial residency either outside the parlor room window or
directly under the piano beneath the house.
But
the levee could not hold back the flood. The moment the music
stopped, Tom’s bid to get the piano was relentless. The first few
unwelcomed visits produced a cacophony as Tom banged away at the keys
with his fists, forearms and elbows - anything that would make a
sound. Slipping in and out of the discord, an occasional three note
refrain may have been heard, or a wild approximation of a melody’s
shifts and turns. But, with surprising speed, his efforts became more
refined until one day, when the family was at dinner, Tom crawled
into the parlor and began to play a simple melody that one of the
girls had been practicing earlier that day. No one paid much
attention, everyone assuming it was a member of the family. They were
naturally astonished when they discovered it was Charity’s blind
son at the piano, although this did not stop them from
unceremoniously booting him from the room.
This
version of events – relayed by Charity – is largely consistent
with the story journalist Henry Watterson heard, admittedly second
hand but, significantly, before the Blind Tom publicity machine
kicked in. The family were out of the room when they heard the piano
tinkle, ‘they ran back and to their amazement, sat the chubby
little black monkey on the stool, banging away for dear life, and yet
not without sequence and rhythm, trying to repeat what they had just
been playing and singing.’
Nine
years on, however, this story was almost unrecognizable. Tom’s lust
for the piano was matched by his management’s urge to mythologize a
single watershed moment: the star-spangled moment the prodigy was
born! The widely read 1862 Atlantic
Monthly
article described a four-year-old with almost superhuman powers.
With stroke of a pen, Tom’s clumsy stab at sequence and rhythm
becomes a triumphant fugue played with delicacy and truth, a
distortion that subsequent versions of the story were loath to
correct. The 1865 concert program insists that although Tom's hands
were “not yet sufficiently developed to cover an octave” he
repeated a difficult aria “even to the perception of a fault”.
In 1868, the concert program was revised and the discovery story was
calibrated with the Atlantic
Monthly’s
version of events plus a small concession to the truth: ‘his
performance, though necessarily very imperfect, was marvelously
strange; this was his first
known effort
at a tune [and] he played with both hands, and used the black as well
as the white keys.’
Putting
aside the “first known effort” claim, Tom’s midnight visit may
very well have taken place. Yet perhaps the watershed it marked was
not Tom’s discovery of the piano, but General Bethune’s discovery
of Tom. Buried away in his Columbus office, his mind burdened with
sectional politics, he barely registered his children’s
incomprehensible reports about the “strange picaninny”. But now,
with the child and the piano before him, the pieces fell into place.
The realization dawned like a rose-petal sun bursting over the
horizon: the “useless encumbrance” he had purchased out of pity
had an extraordinary musical gift.
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