Blind Tom Concert

“He is a great natural curiosity, and performs some marvelous feats of memory, as well as many pieces on piano.”

Grand Piano supplied by Steinway & Sons.

“Blind Tom, the negro pianist now performing at Dodworth Hall, is certainly one of the greatest musical geniuses of this or any other age. With the utmost of ease he plays the most difficult compositions by ear alone, after hearing them played but once by some other pianist. His own compositions are far above the average. Although his other mental faculties seem to be darkened, his musical sense is so acute that he can immediately distinguish and name every note in the most complicated discord. To this negro pianoforte prodigy we call the attention of Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips and the rest of the abolition leaders. He is a very splendid illustration of their arguments in regard to the intellectual development of the African race. Born and reared upon a Southern plantation, the war has emancipated him that he may astonish the world. How many more such wonders may there be among the freedmen of the South? We have discovered a colored Gottschalk, a negro Liszt, an Ethiopian Thalberg, why should we not find a mulatto Milton, a negro Newton, a slave Shakspere [sic], a freedman Fulton, an emancipated Ericsson, a contraband Columbus and a darky Demosthenes? The abolition editors and parsons ought to be writing and preaching copiously about Blind Tom. He is one of the strongest arguments they could present in favor of negro suffrage.

            But there is another point of view in which Blind Tom is exceedingly interesting. In spite of the verdict against Colchester, at Buffalo, and the exposure of the Davenport Brothers at Paris, spiritualism still lives, and our friend Judge Edmonds is its prophet. Let the spiritualists go and take a look at the negro pianist. His ungainly body and his musical soul consort together so oddly that it appears almost probable that he is inspired by the spirit of some defunct musician, who has come back from the seventh circle of Paradise or elsewhere to show this ungodly generation the music of the spiritual spheres. Why not claim Blind Tom, then, as the highest order of medium yet developed? His music is far in advance of that of the Fox Sisters or the Davenport Brothers. They could only rattle tambourines, blow tin trumpets, ring dinner bells and twang phosphorescent guitars, and they required a dark room and a select circle to accomplish even that.           

          But Blind Tom comes out on an open platform, in the full glare of light, before a large audience—the larger the better—and produces the finest melodies upon the best instrument that mankind has been able to invent. Observe him when he’s not playing and no one would ever suspect the tremendous musical genius he possesses; but when he once touches the keys of the piano he is like one inspired. Is his inspiration spiritual, or is it merely musical? That is a question which Judge Edmonds and the spiritualists must answer. If Blind Tom be not accepted by the abolitionists as the most marvelous development of the negro race, and as a striking and convincing proof of the extraordinary capacity of the emancipated slaves, then the spiritualists should take him up and claim him as a first class medium. He will afford an excellent text for the abolition parsons, if they take advantage of his appearance among us; but if they miss the golden opportunity the spiritual professors will not be so foolish as to let this amazing phenomenon pass unnoticed. ” The article then continues to discuss the size of the hall and compare him to the other current acts and shows. “Except dandy ‘Sam,’ the Broadway, Blind Tom is the only novelty among our amusements this season.”

“The force of natural genius is asserting its supremacy in the case of that wonderful phenomenon, blind negro Tom. Could any of our so-called first class pianists crowd a concert hall night after night as this wonderful boy is now doing? They may display a finer mechanism, a more thorough mastery of the genius of the art, but in fire and impulsive genius Tom leaves them all behind. Our articles, which have clearly defined his extraordinary abilities, have so aroused the interest and the curiosity of the people that crowds are turned away from the doors every night. By day Tom is besieged by professional men, who come to test his powers in various ways. They play to him new pieces, they extemporize to puzzle him and test his memory, but they find him apt and ready, and able to meet them upon every point, and they leave him astonished and wondering at his extraordinary gift.

            Tom has now got a new passion. He has taken a fancy to the cornet-a-piston, and in a few days he has accomplished what it would take others a year to do.  His musical genius is evidently so comprehensive that he could with ease conquer the difficulties of any instrument that he undertook to play. Tom has a splendid voice, and before long we shall hear a display of his vocal abilities, which are of no mean order. Tom is indeed a wonder, and cannot be matched in the whole range of musical phenomena.”