Who is blind tom

He also played pieces after one hearing, and memorized poems and text in foreign languages. Advertising claimed Tom was untaught, but in fact he was tutored by a Professor of Music who traveled with him. Blind Tom Wiggins gave his last performance in Skip to content Thomas Wiggins. Do you find this information helpful? In reality, the wily showman used Tom as a propaganda tool to serve his own political agenda. His concerts were a mix of virtuoso pieces and unashamedly popular novelties: imitations of trains, banjos and music boxes, playing one piece with his left hand, another with his right while singing a third, then repeating the feat with his back to piano.

At every concert, audience members put his musical memory to the test, challenging him to reproduce the composition they had just played. By the time he hit his full virtuosic stride, Tom was virtually unbeatable.

As the crowds wildly applauded, he would bound across the stage in a series of spectacular one-footed leaps, howling along with them. The American stage had never seen anything like him. Such descriptions reinforced racist ideas that Africans were closer to the animal kingdom than Europeans. A century and a half ago, there were few earthly explanations, although several unearthly ones were floating about. Some saw Tom as a medium, an empty vessel, who channeled the genius of the great masters.

Tom was undoubtedly in communication with something. Many of his compositions were the fruit of a deep and profound dialogue with the natural and mechanical world. Powered by an almost superhuman capacity to concentrate on details most people would find inconsequential, he could tune into a fantastically intricate world of differentiated repetition: the crank of the butter churn, the drip-drip-drip of water down a drainpipe, the clicketty clack of a train or warble of a bird.

The bliss experienced by Tom as he drank in these sounds gave rise to the erroneous perception that he was perpetually happy. The reality was far more brutal. After years of social and physical isolation, he became morose and suspicious of people.

Tom had no concept of money and was exploited, deceived, manipulated and robbed blind by his white masters and guardians. Emancipation failed to deliver him from the shackles of slavery. Then in , Bethune was killed in a railroad accident.

At the time of his death John Bethune was embroiled in a bitter divorce. In he made a brief comeback on the vaudeville stage.

Twenty years later, the daughter of his former master, Fanny Bethune, began efforts to disinter his body into the Bethune family plot in Georgia. A Columbus resident insisted he carried out her request as best he could, Jim Crow laws forcing him to re-bury Tom at a nearby plantation.

The Evergreen Cemetery, however, had documents to prove that the body was never removed. He began touring the United States at the age of eight and at the age of ten became the first Black musician to give a headline performance at the White House for then-President James Buchanan.

Being autistic and Black, he was unknowingly exploited by his owners, wards, and concert promoters for his gifts at every turn and thus toured the United States as a pianist until Over the course of his life, he became a household name and many famous writers such as Mark Twain and John Steinbeck attended his concerts and chronicled his persona. His published compositions embody 19th-century romanticism with a wide range of emotion and narrative detail.

He was born enslaved, blind and autistic. Having an extraordinary musical talent since he was a young boy, he became one of the best-known American performing pianists in the 19th century. His life story is tragic and remarkable in so many ways.

Not only was he blind, but he was autistic.