![]() Long after the 1865 abolition of slavery, the adult pianist, now also thrilling audiences in Europe, remained largely in thrall of his white managers, one of whom had the courts declare the moneymaking Blind Tom his "idiot" ward. ![]() Predictably, while the white businessmen made handsome profits-even riches-the African American star attraction for his grueling performances got little more than room and board. ![]() After discovering in an 1857 experiment how his enslaved child prodigy could fill a rented auditorium with enthusiastic paying audiences, Colonel Bethune soon was regularly "hiring out" Tom to various concert promoters who booked Blind Tom in hundreds of packed halls from coast to coast. Soon the slave boy was allowed to improvise on his master's piano and, taught some basics by awed instructors, was creating his own original musical compositions.Įxploitation of Blind Tom's musical genius emerged early and proved a major theme of the pianist's five-decade career. One day after listening to the Bethune children's piano lessons, Tom himself took the keyboard and astounded the family by reproducing their notes from memory. Born in antebellum Georgia to an enslaved couple named Wiggins, Tom, who in infancy showed an uncanny ability to mimic sounds of nature, as a toddler first showed his musical genius in the Bethune plantation house where his mother labored. ![]()
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