Blind Tom Wiggins - Professional Career

Professional Career

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.

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 imitiation 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 his short story, “Johnny Bear” to Blind Tom.