Excellent research and writing, informative and at the same time, a heartbreaking story - there is a CD of his music that was interpreted and recorded by John Davis, John Davis Plays Blind Tom - The Eighth Wonder - Newport Classics, 1999 ( )

The life of the blind musical savant Thomas Wiggins (b. 1849) is fantastical even as straightforward storytelling. The last American slave and the most popular black entertainer of the 19th c. (and the first ever to perform at the White House), Blind Tom made three separate fortunes for white people. His stage show included piano concertos, spirituals and sentimental ballads, along with the sounds of thunderstorms, weapons, trains, sermons, political speeches, bits of overheard conversation and eccentric convulsive gymnastics. Before he died in Hoboken in 1908, his death had been reported several times—first during a harrowing flight from Union armies after Sherman’s march through Georgia, another time after the Johnstown flood.

Such a life, according to Deirdre O’Connell, is ripe for reconsideration in the 21st c. Impressively researched and beautifully written, The Ballad of Blind Tom pays heed to the impressions and recollections of Tom’s contemporaries and the historical context of his life while persuasively demonstrating that the 19th c. imagination was ill-equipped to comprehend just who Tom was and what he was up to. O’Connell engages the more interesting themes raised by the life of Blind Tom: the contradiction between whites’ view of Tom as a bestial ‘moronic genius’ and the African-American concept of the Spirit Child, born with second sight and endowed with a gift for music and mimicry; the indentured man’s defiance and self-assertion despite his constant sense of insecurity and his absolute dependence on his self-serving handlers—a dependence that to black intellectuals looked like allegiance to the Confederate cause during the war and dedication to the master-slave relationship afterwards; Blind Tom as a symbol of Americans’ conflicting devotions to both white supremacy and democracy. Written with insight and empathy, The Ballad of Blind Tom may not be the last word on the man, but O’Connell makes it hard for anyone any longer to disregard the complex humanity that was denied Tom during his own lifetime. ( )

A fascinating story and vivid chronicle of America's most famous 19th pianist - an eccentric oddball, if there ever was one - who today is virtually forgotten. ( )

An amazing insight into the tragic but beautiful life of a musical autistic savant who rose to fame in the nineteenth century. Engrossing from start to finish. ( )