Blind Tom Wiggins

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.

[7] With his skills recognized by General Bethune, Tom was permitted to live in a room attached to the family house, equipped with a piano.

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 10 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.

[9] 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,[10] "equivalent to $1.5 million/year [in 2004], making Blind Tom undoubtedly the nineteenth century's most highly compensated pianist".

Eventually he learned a reported 7,000 pieces of music, including hymns, popular songs, waltzes, and classical repertoire.

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.

His piano recitals were augmented by other talents, including uncanny voice mimicry of public figures and nature sounds.

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.

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.

Novelist Willa Cather, writing in the Nebraska State Journal, called Tom "a human phonograph, a sort of animated memory, with sound producing power.

In 1882, John Bethune married his landlady, Eliza Stutzbach, who had demonstrated a knack for mollifying Tom's sometimes volatile temperament.

Tom continued performing and touring for a number of years under the management of Eliza and her attorney (and later husband) Albrecht Lerche.

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.

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.

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.

It is believed that Tom experienced a stroke (described in some reports as "partial paralysis") in December 1904, which ended his public performing career.

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 2019, Blind Tom was featured on a mural depicting the history of performing and visual arts in New Braunfels, Texas as part of the city's 175th anniversary celebration.