Discovering "Blind Tom," The Slave Turned Civil War-Era Pop Star

Jeffery Renard Allen , author of Song of the Shank , on the musical genius of Thomas Greene Wiggins.

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Several years ago I encountered the story of Thomas Greene Wiggins in the pages of Oliver Sacks' wonderful study of unusual neurological case studies, An Anthropologist on Mars. Born a slave in Georgia in 1849, Wiggins was one of the first African-American classical performers and composers, a well-known and widely celebrated cultural phenomenon from 1858 when he first began giving stage recitals on the piano, through the 1870s and 1880s when his popularity waned. Under the stage name "Blind Tom," he gave mind-blowing "exhibitions" where he performed interpretations of pieces by venerated composers such as Mozart, Bach, Chopin, and Liszt, while also engaging in far less conventional musical spectacle. He conjured up imitations on his piano of natural and man-made phenomena such as rainstorms and sewing machines, playing and singing three songs at once in different keys, and inviting members of the audience to test his powers of memory with their own original compositions, newly heard tunes that he would reproduce note for note before venturing off on his own variations and improvisations.

I was especially struck by Sacks' description of Wiggins' stage performances, his "exhibition," as the showmanship, imitations, and other tricks seemed so far ahead of their time, deserving comparison to 20th-century performers like Roland Kirk and Jimi Hendrix, among others. I decided to find out all I could about this forgotten musical pioneer. A good year after reading Sacks, I was lucky enough to be rewarded with a fellowship to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers where I could begin to research Wiggins in earnest, having by then decided to use Wiggins as the basis of a novel, which carried the simple working title Tom. (Well, initially I thought Wiggins would be a principal character in a novel with three independent story lines like some of Faulkner's novels or Caryl Phillips' The Nature of Blood. Then another fellow at the center told me, "Cut the pretense. Just write about Blind Tom." It took two years of starts and stops to figure out that she was right.)

A contemporary of fellow virtuosos such as Liszt and Rubinstein, Wiggins was by some accounts the highest-paid pianist of the 19th century, earning more than $100,000 annually during the period of his greatest popularity. In 1860, he performed for President James Buchanan at the White House. At the start of the Civil War, he was such a draw and respected figure that President Abraham Lincoln gave serious consideration to the idea of enlisting him in the service of the Union. And other noted contemporaries had much to say about him. Mark Twain speculated that Wiggins was a kind of "angel" who derived his musical abilities from supernatural forces. Praising the military strategies of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Ulysses S. Grant remarked, "Forrest fights the way Blind Tom touches the keys." Willa Cather reviewed a Blind Tom recital for her college newspaper and was so impressed by his playing that she called him a "human music box." She would go on to model the character of Blind D'Arnault after Wiggins in her celebrated novel My Antonia. Wiggins remained a public figure even after his retirement from stage, the constant subject of rumor and speculation about his fate and whereabouts. His "death" often made the headlines, with reports of him having been struck down by some affliction or claimed by a catastrophe.

Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed

But these were only the historical facts about a performer named "Blind Tom." Who was the actual person, Thomas Greene Wiggins? This person is far harder to know and understand because the reputed firsthand reports about him are informed by the racial prejudices of the time. Added to this, Wiggins himself had remained largely silent during his life. He gave no interviews. He dictated no letters, essays, or narratives. This silence cost him. His owner and manager arranged for him to give concerts with proceeds going to the Confederacy. Because he either could not or would not speak on his own behalf, a Cincinnati court ruled not long after the close of the Civil War that he was incapable of managing his own affairs and so appointed his "owner," Gen. Thomas Neil Bethune, a newspaper publisher and propagandist for secession, as his legal guardian. Two decades later, when Wiggins was in his late twenties, Bethune's daughter-in-law sued for and was awarded custody of him.

How to explain Wiggins' silence? Was he so completely unaware of