THOMAS " BLIND TOM " WIGGINS
Según comenta Isabelle Leymarie , pianista y escritora en su libro PIANO JAZZ .Una crónica del jazz clásico y moderno a través de sus pianistas-. Thomas Bethune ( apellido de su dueño, el general James Neil Bethune ) Thomas Wiggins nació en Harris Country, Georgia allá por el 1849 , muriendo en Hoboken - New Jersey en 1908 , nacido esclavo en una plantación , ciego y probablemente autista . fué un prodigio musical. Autodidacta, era capaz de reproducir de oído todas las piezas que escuchaba, y conocía unas 700 de memoria. Dió conciertos en Europa, alcanzando fama internacional y proporcionando ingresos considerables para el general Bethune, que controlaba su carrera. Pese a su carrera tuvo una vida trágica llena de obstáculos y sinsabores, y murió en la miseria. Nunca grabó pero dejo algunas composiciones para piano, entre ellas " The Battle of Manassas" " Gran March Resurrection" " Water in the moonlight " y Sewing Song : Imitation of a Sewing Machine" . Os ofrcemos unos ideos descriptivos de su música.
Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins (May 25, 1849 – June 14, 1908) was an African American musical prodigy on the piano. He had numerous original compositions published and had a lengthy and largely successful performing career throughout the United States. During the 19th century, he was one of the best-known American performing pianists. Although he lived and died before autism was described, he is now regarded as an autistic savant.
Wiggins was born on the Wiley Edward Jones Plantation in Harris County, Georgia. Blind at birth, he was sold in 1850 along with his enslaved parents, Charity and Domingo "Mingo" Wiggins, to a Columbus, Georgia, lawyer, General James Neil Bethune.Bethune was "almost the pioneer free trader" in the United States and "the first [newspaper] editor in the south to openly advocate secession".General Bethune renamed the child Thomas Greene Bethune or Thomas Wiggins Bethune (according to different sources).
Because Tom was blind, he could not perform work normally demanded of slaves, his owners originally wanted to kill him since he had no economic value to them. Instead, he was left to play and explore the Bethune plantation. At an early age, he showed an interest in the piano after hearing the instrument played by Bethune's daughters. By age four he reportedly had acquired some piano skills by ear, and gained access to the piano. By age five Tom reportedly had composed his first tune, The Rain Storm, after a torrential downpour on a tin roof.With his skills recognized by General Bethune, Tom was permitted to live in a room attached to the family house, equipped with a piano. Neighbor Otto Spahr, reminiscing about Tom in the Atlanta Constitution in 1908 (as reproduced in The Ballad of Blind Tom, by Deirdre O'Connell), observed: "Tom seemed to have but two motives in life: the gratification of his appetite and his passion for music. I don't think I exaggerate when I state that he made the piano go for twelve hours out of twenty-four."
As a child, Tom began to echo the sounds around him, repeating accurately the crow of a rooster or the singing of a bird. If he was left alone in the cabin, Tom was known to begin beating on pots and pans or dragging chairs across the floor in an attempt to make any kind of noise. By the age of four, Tom was able to repeat conversations up to ten minutes in length but was barely able to adequately communicate his own needs, resorting to grunts and gestures.
Another example of Tom's extraordinary abilities was shown after he was taken to a political rally in 1860 in support of Democratic presidential candidate Stephen Douglas. Years after he attended this speech, he was still able to repeat it while capturing the tone and mannerisms of Douglas. Additionally, he was able to recreate the heckles and cheers of the crowd with remarkable precision.
Bethune hired out "Blind Tom" from the age of eight years to concert promoter Perry Oliver, who toured him extensively in the US, performing as often as four times a day and earning Oliver and Bethune up to $100,000 a year, an enormous sum for the time,"equivalent to $1.5 million/year [in 2004], making Blind Tom undoubtedly the nineteenth century's most highly compensated pianist".General Bethune's family eventually made a fortune estimated at $750,000 at the hands of Blind Tom. Oliver marketed Tom as a "Barnum-style freak" advertising the transformation from animal to artist. In the media, Tom was frequently compared to a bear, baboon, or mastiff.
Bethune hired professional musicians to play for Tom, who could faithfully reproduce their performances, often after a single listening. Eventually he learned a reported 7,000 pieces of music, including hymns, popular songs, waltzes, and classical repertoire.
Professional career
Blind Tom Wiggins seated
Blind Tom circa 1861
There are conflicting historical accounts of Blind Tom's first public performance, some indicating he was as young as three. One account from 1857 indicates that he had been performing publicly for several years. Newspaper reviews and audience reactions were favorable, prompting General Bethune to undertake a concert tour with Tom around their home state of Georgia. Tom later toured the South with Bethune or accompanied by hired managers, though their travels and bookings were sometimes hampered by the North-South hostilities which were drawing the nation towards Civil War. In 1860, Blind Tom performed at the White House before President James Buchanan; he was the first African-American to give a command performance at the White House. Mark Twain attended many of Blind Tom's performances over several decades and chronicled the proceedings.
On- and off-stage, Tom often referred to himself in the third person (e.g., "Tom is pleased to meet you"). His piano recitals were augmented by other talents, including uncanny voice mimicry of public figures and nature sounds. He also displayed a hyperactive physicality both onstage and off. A letter written in 1862 by a soldier in North Carolina described some of Tom's eccentric capabilities: "One of his most remarkable feats was the performance of three pieces of music at once. He played 'Fisher's Hornpipe' with one hand and 'Yankee Doodle' with the other and sang 'Dixie' all at once. He also played a piece with his back to the piano and his hands inverted." At concerts, skeptics attempted to confirm if Tom's performance replications were mere trickery; their challenge took the form of having Tom hear and repeat two new, uncirculated compositions. Tom did so perfectly. The "audience challenge" eventually became a regular feature of his concerts.
Supposedly, Tom's talents profited the Confederacy during the Civil War. His most famous song, "The Battle of Manassas", is the story of the Confederate Army's 1861 victory at the Battle of Bull Run. As a result, many black newspapers refused to celebrate him, pointing out that he served to reinforce negative stereotypes about African-American individuals and that he was only a source of profit for slaveholders.
In 1866, at age 16, Tom was taken on a European concert tour by General Bethune, who collected testimonials about Tom's natural talents from composer-pianist Ignaz Moscheles and pianist-conductor Charles Hallé. These were printed in a booklet, "The Marvelous Musical Prodigy Blind Tom", and used to bolster Tom's international reputation.
In 1875, General Bethune transferred management of Blind Tom's professional affairs to his son John Bethune, who accompanied Tom on tour around the U.S. for the next eight years. Beginning in 1875, John brought Blind Tom to New York each summer. While living with John in a boarding house on the Lower East Side, Tom added to his repertoire under the tutelage of Joseph Poznanski, who also transcribed new compositions by Tom for publication. Many of these were, at Tom's insistence, published under such pseudonyms as Professor W.F. Raymond, J.C. Beckel, C.T. Messengale, and Francois Sexalise.
Tom's piano-playing behavior, both during practice and performance, was eccentric. "We had two pianos in one room", Poznanski told the Washington Post in 1886 (as recounted in O'Connell's biography). "I would play for him and he would get up, walk around, stand on one foot, pull his hair, knock his head against the wall, then sit down and play a very good imitation of what I had played with additions to it. His memory was something prodigious. He never forgot anything." This led some critics to dismiss Tom as a novelty act, a "human parrot." Novelist Willa Cather, writing in the Nebraska State Journal, called Tom "a human phonograph, a sort of animated memory, with sound producing power."
John Steinbeck has compared the main character in a short story of his, "Johnny Bear", to Blind Tom.
No original recordings of Blind Tom appear to exist. His sheet music is available, but only a small number of musicians have ever recorded his original songs.
Custody battle
In 1882, John Bethune married his landlady, Eliza Stutzbach, who had demonstrated a knack for mollifying Tom's sometimes volatile temperament. However, shortly after their marriage, John Bethune embarked on an extended tour of the U.S. with Tom, in effect abandoning Eliza. When Bethune returned home eight months later, his wife filed for divorce. The couple split up—John took Tom—but a bitter legal squabble ensued, with Eliza hounding John for financial support, a claim that the courts usually adjudicated in John's favor. After John Bethune died in a railway accident in 1884, Tom was returned—over Eliza's objections—to the care of General Bethune (now living in Virginia). Eliza sued General Bethune for custody, with Tom's elderly mother Charity enjoined by Eliza's attorney as a party in the plaintiff's suit. After a protracted custody battle in several courts, in August 1887 Tom was awarded to Eliza, who moved Tom back to New York. Charity accompanied them with the understanding that she would benefit financially from Tom's earnings. However, after it became apparent that Eliza did not intend to honor any financial obligations to Charity, Tom's mother returned to Georgia.
Tom continued performing and touring for a number of years under the management of Eliza and her attorney (and later husband) Albrecht Lerche. Tom was on tour in western Pennsylvania in May 1889 on the day of the Johnstown Flood, and rumor spread that he was among the casualties. Despite his continued appearances on the U.S. concert circuit, the rumor persisted for years, with some observers expressing skepticism that the Blind Tom who appeared in concert after 1889 was the "real Blind Tom".
In this phase of his career, Tom usually introduced himself onstage in the third person, imitating the pronouncements of his various managers from years past. He talked about his mental state with a characteristic lack of self-awareness. He had been diagnosed as non compos mentis by a doctor, and in his foggy netherworld the phrase was a matter of personal pride. Willa Cather described the poignance of one such concert: "It was a strange sight to see him walk out on stage with his own lips—another man's words—introduce himself and talk quietly about his own idiocy. There was insanity, a grotesque horribleness about it that was interestingly unpleasant. One laughs at the man's queer actions, and yet, after all, the sight is not laughable. It brings us too near to the things that we sane people do not like to think of."
Tom was still traveling, and presumably still performing, in 1894. On July 5 of that year, he arrived in Grand Junction, Colorado, on his way eastward from California. The trainmen at that place were on strike against the railroads as part of the Pullman Strike, and Tom was stuck in town until July 9, when he continued eastward via the Colorado Midland Railroad.
After being dogged by incessant legal challenges to her custodianship of Tom, Eliza took Tom off the concert circuit in the mid-1890s.
Later years
General James N. Bethune and Blind Tom
Tom spent the next ten years as a ward of Eliza and her husband, who divided their time between New York City and New Jersey's Navesink Highlands. In 1903 Eliza arranged for Tom to appear on the popular vaudeville circuit, beginning with Brooklyn's Orpheum Theater. He spent almost a year performing in vaudeville, before his health began to deteriorate. It is believed he suffered a stroke (described in some reports as "partial paralysis") in December 1904, which ended his public performing career.
After the death of her husband, Eliza relocated to Hoboken, New Jersey, with Tom.[10] They kept out of public view, though neighbors could hear Tom's piano playing at all hours of the day and night. Tom suffered a major stroke in April 1908, and died the following June at age 59 years old and as a freeman. He was buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.
Posthumous recognition
The people of Columbus, Georgia, raised a commemorative headstone for him in 1976. He was the subject of a play titled HUSH: Composing Blind Tom Wiggins, by Robert Earl Price, which was performed on the Atlanta stage with Del Hamilton as director.
Between 1970 and 2000, Dr. Geneva Handy Southall wrote a three-volume thesis titled Blind Tom: The Black Pianist Composer; Continuously Enslaved; it was published by Scarecrow Press in 2002.
In 1981 he was the subject of a film, Blind Tom: The Story of Thomas Bethune, directed by Mark W. Travis.
In 1999 John Davis recorded an album of Tom's original compositions on a CD entitled John Davis Plays Blind Tom. The CD package included essays by Amiri Baraka, Ricky Jay and Oliver Sacks.
In 2006, Reagan Grimsley published an article about preserving the sheet music of Blind Tom for future Generations. Titled "Discovering "Blind" Tom Wiggins: Creating Digital Access to Original Sheet Music at the Columbus State University Archives", it appeared in Music Reference Quarterly.
A full-length biography, The Ballad of Blind Tom, by Deirdre O'Connell was published by Overlook Press in 2009.
Andre T. Regan's 2013 documentary, The Last Legal Slave in America, documents the life and times of Blind Tom.
The Elton John song "The Ballad of Blind Tom", from his 2013 album The Diving Board, is about Blind Tom.
Blind Tom Wiggins is the subject of a novel, The Song of the Shank, (2014) by Jeffrey Reynard Allen.
Blind Tom Wiggins is also the subject in a sequence of poems in Olio (2016) by Tyehimba Jess.
My greatest-grandfather was the first African-American to perform at the White House. Not only was he blind, but he was autistic. He is referenced as the 167 most famous autistic person in the world; Throughout his life, he toured Great Britain, Scotland, Europe, Canada, the Rocky Mountain states, the far West, and South America. By 1861, my greatest-grandfather was giving prestigious performances such as one in Washington, D.C. for the first Japanese diplomats to visit the United States. He performed for the likes of Mark Twain and he earned his slave owners a fortune of $750,000, bringing home $50,000 per year - in which reports claim that he gave it all to charity. Charity being his owners....
-Teisha Dynell Wiggins aka Miss $wiss
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @MISS__SWISS
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July 21 2016 is the 155th anniversary of the Civil War’s first land battle, remembered both as the Battle of Manassas and Bull Run. Its passing marks not just a David and Goliath struggle of 15,000 Rebel soldiers triumphing over 50,000 Northerners, but the debut of a Great Big Sound. The decibel hell of war invaded the senses and colonized the air : a rumble louder than thunder, punctuated by the bellow of cannon, dry staccato of artillery, whistle of bullets and shrieks of the wounded.
Few Civil War documents evoke this “fiendish melody” of battle as powerfully as the musical composition of a slave pianist, once known throughout the south as “Blind Tom”. Today Thomas Wiggins might be called a musical autistic savant, but 150 years ago he hovered somewhere between a respected concert pianist and glorified sideshow freak.
In the wave of euphoria after Manassas, Tom tuned his hypersensitive ear into the music of the big-mouthed guns. He then framed these sounds with the South’s triumphant version of events, before composing what many believed was his masterpiece. From April 1862 until his death in 1908, his concerts were not complete without a show-stopping rendition of his Battle of Manassas.
Tom’s impressionistic musical description of the battle pits the harmony of the right hand against the discord of the left. An insistent bass conjures the trudge of marching columns, tonal clusters evoke the roar of cannon and musketry. A brooding soundscape then ducks, weaves and punches its way into a medley of popular and patriotic songs - Yankee Doodle, Dixie, The Star Spangled Banner and Le Marseillaise - discord tugging at the heels of the melody until it finally implodes into the chaos of a harem-scarem finale.
“In an age before recorded sound, Blind Tom’s Battle of Manassas was perhaps the only reference point whereby soldiers, citizens and slaves could make sense of the aural assault”, said biographer Deirdre O'Connell, author of The Ballad of Blind Tom.
Discover more about Blind Tom.
Discover more about Blind Tom.
At first, Southern audiences interpreted Tom’s Battle of Manassas as a measure of his loyalty to the Confederacy. However as rebellion dragged on, his dispassionate journey into the polyphony of battle- conjured as much by vocal effects as the piano - became, in the words of one Southern girl, “too perfect for enjoyment”. For Tom, who cared nothing for politics, this was pure decibel heaven. Nothing cranked it up to eleven quite like the theater of war.
The story of war and music has often been told, from the do-it-yourself tremolo of the Rebel Yell to the heavy metal soundtrack of the Iraq War. Less observed, though twice as audible, is the music that so enraptured young Blind Tom Wiggins in the early days of the war. A shock of noise that redefined the limits of “loud”: a thunder that reverberated somewhere betwixt decibel heaven and hell.
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