"Blind Tom." [Bethune, Thomas. or Wiggins, Thomas.] (1849–1908)
Tom / The Blind Negro Boy Pianist / Oliver Gallop
New York: Horace Waters. 1860. Sheet music for the Oliver Gallop composed by Tom and bearing a full-length lithographed portrait of the musician at the age of ten on the front cover. 6 pp (3 leaves); small folio. Considerably tattered and torn, the image mostly unaffected. Published simultaneously with "Virginia Polka" which had the same lithographed cover. Complete copies of this sheet music are rare, with WorldCat locating fewer than ten copies.Born enslaved and formally uneducated, his unique musical talent led to world tours, performances at the White House and an enthusiastic fan base that included Mark Twain. His unusual ability to play the piano and recall speech was discovered at an early age so that before he was ten he was touring the country and making vast sums of money for his owner, General James Neil Bethune and his manager, Perry Oliver, for whom "Oliver's Galop" is named. Now believed to be an autistic savant, during his amazing life this musical prodigy is reported to have learned to play more than 7,000 pieces, including standard classical and Romantic repertoire and many original compositions. One of the earliest concert reviews published in the Baltimore Sun on June 27, 1860 announced that Tom was a phenomenon in the musical world "thrusting all our conceptions of the science to the wall and informing us that there is a musical world of which we know nothing." Mark Twain, a great enthusiast for Tom's playing, wrote in 1869 that Tom "lorded it over the emotions of his audience like an autocrat. He swept them like a storm, with his battle-pieces; he lulled them to rest again with melodies as tender as those we hear in dreams; he gladdened them with others that rippled through the charmed air as happily and cheerily as the riot the linnets make in California woods; and now and then he threw in queer imitations of the tuning of discordant harps and fiddles, and the groaning and wheezing of bag-pipes, that sent the rapt silence into tempests of laughter. And every time the audience applauded when a piece was finished, this happy innocent joined in and clapped his hands, too, and with vigorous emphasis...Some archangel, cast out of upper Heaven like another Satan, inhabits this coarse casket; and he comforts himself and makes his prison beautiful with thoughts and dreams and memories of another time... It is not Blind Tom that does these wonderful things and plays this wonderful music--it is the other party." (23142)
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