March 3, 2021
He Was Born Into Slavery, but Achieved Musical Stardom
The life and work of Thomas Wiggins, who toured as “Blind Tom,” has been given more attention in recent years.
Charity Wiggins, a slave on a Georgia plantation, was 48 in May 1849, when she gave birth to a baby boy.
The child, whom she named Thomas, was born blind, and Charity feared that their owner would deem him a useless burden — with potentially dire consequences. Sure enough, before long Charity’s family — of five, at the time — was put up for sale to settle some of the owner’s debts.
Charity made a bold plea to Gen. James Neil Bethune, a fiercely pro-slavery lawyer and newspaper editor in Columbus, Ga., to keep her family together; probably out of pity, he agreed and bought them. He could not have imagined that acquiring the Wiggins slaves would make him a fortune.
For within a decade, Charity’s son had become a touring musical phenomenon, reportedly earning up to $100,000 a year, well over $1 million today and enough to make him among the best compensated performing artists of his time. Under the stage name “Blind Tom” Wiggins, he played his own compositions and improvised on the piano, demonstrating uncanny skills at replicating, note for note, pieces he heard — both classical works and popular songs.
One of his tricks involved playing “Fisher’s Hornpipe” with one hand and “Yankee Doodle” with the other, while singing “Dixie.” He could repeat political speeches he had heard months before, mimicking the vocal cadences of the speaker, even in foreign languages unknown to him.
There are countless testimonies to his fathomless skills, even if they often reek of paternalistic or white supremacist attitudes. During a tour to Europe when Wiggins was 16, he won praise from major musicians. The composer and pianist Ignaz Moscheles deemed him a “singular and inexplicable phenomenon.” The Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, though insisting that Wiggins was no prodigy in the traditional sense, described him as a “marvelous freak of nature.” Mark Twain followed Wiggins’s career for years.
Though his talents were astonishing, Wiggins’s concerts became outlandish spectacles. He had a habit of gyrating and moving his body spasmodically while performing, and even while being promoted as the “Wonder of the World,” many described him as an “idiot,” even an “imbecile.” (It is possible that he was on the autism spectrum.)
Very little of his enormous earnings went directly to him. Gen. Bethune signed a contract with an ambitious promoter. After emancipation, Wiggins remained essentially an indentured servant to Bethune, who eventually became Wiggins legal guardian.
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John Davis made a pioneering recording of 14 works by Wiggins in 1999, on the Newport Classics label — a labor of love that included extensive liner notes, including essays by the neurologist Oliver Sacks and the writer and activist Amiri Baraka.
Among the pieces are bewitching scores like “Oliver Galop,” “Virginia Polka” and “The Rainstorm,” which evoke 19th-century classical styles, as well as parlor songs and dance music of the day. Davis also offers a compelling account of Wiggins’s most remarkable piece, “The Battle of Manassas,” a nearly eight-minute work written around 1863, when he was 14, that evokes the first major victory of the Confederate army, an event that had been recounted to Wiggins in detail.
That piece was a high point of a livestreamed recital that Jeremy Denk gave in October at Caramoor. Denk had not known of the work before reading about it in a New York Times article last July, in which the composer George Lewis proposed a new repertory of works, old and new, by Black composers. In a short conversation with Lewis paired with his Caramoor performance, Denk describes “Manassas” as a fascinating example of “modernism before its time.” The score is run through with spiky, dissonant harmonies and bold juxtaposition of incongruent materials.
The piece opens brutally, with the sounds of cannons and trampling feet suggested through low, rumbling cluster chords Denk plays with his whole hand or fist. (Wiggins used cluster chords many decades before Henry Cowell was credited with inventing the technique.) Over these chords we hear, in the high register, the sprightly tune “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and, soon after, “Dixie” — as those clusters keep coming.
Episodes follow with the sounds of fife-and-drum marching tunes, bugle fanfares, and, suddenly, echoes of Chopinesque lyricism, like melancholic parlor songs. Could this be nostalgia for antebellum domestic life? A transitional passage of shimmering high tremolos leads to the “Marseillaise,” of all things, played in full chords over a stride-like accompaniment, though rumbling clusters down below just will not stop. The ending — “shocking for its time,” as Denk says — depicts the retreat of the Union forces and is a teeming apotheosis, with the national anthem sounding in rolled chords; incessant low clusters; a reprise of the “Marseillaise”; furious outbursts of oscillating Lisztian octaves; dense clusters; and a curious fadeaway.
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