Albumen CDV full-length studio portrait of musician and composer Thomas "Blind Tom" Greene Wiggins. Chicago, IL: S.M. Fassett's, n.d. Period pencil inscription reads "Blind Tom" to mount recto lower margin. Photographer's imprint to mount verso. 

A powerful portrait of Tom Greene Wiggins. The musician-composer is seated on an intricate wooden bench, a display of dried flowers next to him. Wiggins casually extended his right foot towards the camera, his right hand holding onto the armrest.

The story of Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins (1849 - 1908) is one of beauty and tragedy intertwined. He is described by many today as an autistic savant and was presumed to be mentally deficient in his lifetime, often deemed by contemporaries to be nothing more than a human parrot. Such discussions often overshadow his artistic achievement. He demonstrated a preternatural skill in playing the piano, was able to memorize long passages of both music and speech and possessed an uncanny ability to recreate almost any sound he heard. Belying his supposed “idiocy,” he wrote and published music and continuously toured throughout the United States, including the western frontier, as well as internationally, for most of his life.

Born into slavery in Georgia, he was purchased as a young child with his parents by James Neil Bethune (1803 - 1895). Blind from birth, Tom’s musical talent was recognized early, and Bethune leased Tom to a Barnum-style spectacle producer at the tender age of 8. He performed as often as four times a day, earning his enslaver over $100,000 a year. In 1860, he visited Congress and played for President James Buchanan, possibly the first featured performance by an African American at the White House. He almost certainly earned more than any other pianist of the day, though it is the tragic reality that his earnings went to neither him nor his family.

Despite the outcome of the Civil War, Tom, by any practical measure, never seems to have gained his own freedom. Declared "non compos mentis," General Bethune applied for Tom’s guardianship and continued to exploit his labor. In 1875, Bethune transferred to his son, John, the management of Tom. After John’s death, Tom was at the center of a fierce custody battle. In the proceedings, he is often written about as though he were property rather than a person. Even in 1895, when Bethune was on his deathbed, the New York Times headline read, “The Owner of ‘Blind Tom’ Ill.”

Musically, he is best remembered for composing The Battle of Manassas (1861 or 1862), which poignantly represents the complicated life of Blind Tom. The piece memorializes the First Battle of Bull Run (known by Confederates as the First Battle of Manassas), the first major battle of the Civil War, and a decisive victory for the South. It was met with critical acclaim by white audiences and newspapers, and possibly used to raise money for the Confederate cause. Black voices are silent, with African American newspapers having distanced themselves from Tom, believing that white slaveowners used Tom to perpetuate stereotypes and line their own pockets. The piece itself, described as a tone poem, demonstrates Tom’s remarkable capability of capturing the atmosphere of a scene, recreating the sounds of the battlefield. Notably, it is one of the first examples of tone clusters, used to represent cannon fire. The piece was played continuously at nearly every concert until his death in 1908.

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