As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers, and militant prophets.

In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.

As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers, and militant prophets.

In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.'

In an essay Allen wrote about the novel and in interviews, he discusses how he began writing The Song of the Shank when he learned of Thomas Wiggins in Oliver Sacks' book An Anthropologist on Mars.

Allen started researching Wiggins and working on the novel while he was a fellow at The Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

On the novel's acknowledgment page, Allen mentions some of the wide-ranging musical influences that shaped his writing, including the Malian singer Oumou Sangaré and the rock band Tool.

Song of the Shank is a novel loosely based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African-American pianist, composer, and performer, who played under the stage name Blind Tom.

He also wrote, "The imaginative artist, especially one such as Allen, who carries the resources of the poet and the psychic in his trick bag.…"[1] Booklist gave the novel a starred review where the reviewer wrote: "In the extraordinarily talented hands of Allen, Tom is a mysterious and compelling figure, a blind black boy at a time when his perceived infirmities, including his race, should make him insignificant.... [A] tour de force.... A brilliant book, with echoes of Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner."

The novel received additional blurbs on the book and printed and online publicity from a number of distinguished writers, including John Edgar Wideman, Ishmael Reed, and Rene Steinke.

Jeffery Renard Allen so fully inhabits this imagined history, and so convincingly renders the charisma and mystery of Blind Tom, the story seems as alive and immediate as this very present moment.