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, 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.
A full-length biography, The Ballad of Blind Tom, Slave Pianist, by Deirdre O'Connell, was published by Overlook Press in 2009.
Read more about this topic: Blind Tom Wiggins
Famous quotes containing the words posthumous and/or recognition:
“Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other’s participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)