For musicians with the “Blind” title during the 1920s and 1930s, phonograph technology was a medium for their transformation from mendicant to celebrity. Disabled African American musicians were rarely given a unique status prior to access to the technology. Representations of Black disability in American popular culture date at least to the nineteenth century, with Thomas Daddy Rice’s character of minstrelsy Jim Crow. His blackface routine mocking a disabled slave dressed in rags that premiered in 1828 was enormously popular and became the namesake of the century of legal segregation following Reconstruction.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Blind Tom and Blind Boone, two prominent African American musicians with the “Blind” title became popular and were featured
102 W. M. Byrd and L. A. Clayton, "Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States:
A Historical Survey," Journal of the National Medical Association 93, no. 3 Suppl (2001): 14s- 19s.
in the most prominent theaters and newspapers in the United States. Both of them were concert pianists marketed and marked by the “Blind” appellation to white audiences during Reconstruction. The musicians have been the subjects of scholarship particularly related to savant and autistic behaviors displayed by Tom Wiggins in descriptions by the era’s most noted personalities.103 Whether this was the genesis of the appellation is unclear, as the designation of monikers for African American slaves was a common practice. The significance of the pianists’ blindness differs from the musicians of the Race record era. The compositions of these musicians from the nineteenth century were infrequently the focus of discussions, and often Wiggins and Boone were applauded for their interpretations of the Western European canon. The musicians of with the “Blind” title during the Race record era performed exclusively downhome music marketed to African American audiences, which differentiates them from their nineteenth-century precedents.
Blind Tom and Blind Boone were both national celebrities in the nineteenth century as concert pianists performing for white audiences. They represent the earliest well-documented African American performers with the epithet. Wiggins and Boone were celebrated in articles in the Black Press and New York Times while Lemon Jefferson, Blake, and others in the 1920s were absent but for advertisements and the rare, brief mention of their successes. Both pianists were well-documented antecedents of the Race record era and differed in their cultural significance. Blind Boone was highly trained and educated at a school for the blind, Blind Tom, who is now labeled an autistic savant was born into slavery and performed after Emancipation under the
103 Deirdre O'Connell, The Ballad of Blind Tom, 1st ed. (New York: Overlook Duckworth,
2009); Barile, Montgomery, and Fuell, Merit Not Sympathy Wins : The Life and Times of Blind
management of his former captor.104 Blind Boone and Blind Tom performed not on records but rather in concerts well attended by mostly white audiences astounded by the spectacle of a blind Black interpretation of the Western European canon on the piano. In this regard, blindness and the “Blind” appellation from this nineteenth-century manifestation seem unrelated and incomparable to the musicians of Race records.
Wiggins was born with visual impairment but could detect light and shadows, Boone had his eyes removed as a child during an encephalitic fever. While Boone married his manager’s sister, blind people were forbidden by law to marry in some states, for fear they might populate the world with people also unfairly perceived as deficient. The prominence of eugenics was pervasive in the interwar era, the period of the later musicians, but also affected the first musicians with the blind title.105
The nineteenth-century study of phrenology was not based in science, but often xenophobic discriminatory prejudice. The measurement and the feel of a subject’s skull were thought to reveal a psychological makeup and that certain parts of the brain performed specific functions. This involved both racist and disabling preconceptions in examining subjects. While this preceded technology that could verify any of these speculations about brain function, it became popular pseudoscience.106
104 Early Schools for the Blind were integrated. Mary Barile, Christine Montgomery, and
Melissa Fuell, Merit Not Sympathy Wins: The Life and Times of Blind Boone (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2012). Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, "Finding Autism in the Compositions of a 19th-Century Prodigy: Reconsidering “Blind Tom” Wiggins " in Sounding Off, ed. Joseph N. Straus Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2006).
105 See David M. Turner, Kevin Stagg, and Medicine Society for the Social History of, Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, vol. 25 (New York; London;: Routledge/SSHM,
2006).
106Early twenty-first century research on blindness utilizes technologies like MRI to scan brain function and examine similar processes that were speculated a century earlier. From a humanistic perspective, this research appears
Nineteenth-century eugenicists preoccupied with cranial measurements were interested in Blind Tom. His portrait was featured in the American Phrenological Journal in December 1865, the month the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The opening paragraph of the article features questions offered by the journal’s curious readers, “What about Blind Tom?...Have you examined his head? Wherein does his great gift lie? Is he idiotic or is he a genius?”107 Five years earlier the same journal proclaimed the then ten-year-old, “He is regarded as the musical wonder of the world.”108 The figure below features the article about Wiggins,
featuring his portrait in the American Phrenological Journal (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Portrait of Blind Tom, American Phrenological Journal, December 1865
The images of Blind Tom and Blind Boone, whose pre-phonograph concert careers were part of white popular culture, are documented in multiple photographs. This is in contrast to Blind
to involve similarly controversial ethical issues. While the science this research may reveal insights into cognition and perception, it raises debates because the studies promote disabling positions of difference, abnormalities. These studies can be seen as continuing to objectify as opposed to recognizing “disability is a natural part of human experience.” (Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act of 2000) https://www.acl.gov/sites/default/files/about- acl/2016-12/dd_act_2000.pdf
107 "Blind Tom," American Phrenological Journal 43, no. 6 (1865).
Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and Blind Willie Johnson who share a commonality related to their social status despite their prominence as recording artists. Only one photograph of each is known to exist, with the image’s impact intensified by its singularity. Occasionally photographs surface claiming to be the image of the musicians and several collectors attest to having acquired photos from family members, but these have not resulted in any publicly available images.109 One might compare this dearth to the numerous images of popular white musicians, like Bing Crosby or Paul Whiteman, or even to those of African American musicians, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, or especially Louis Armstrong. The following photographs used by record companies feature the only known images of Johnson and Jefferson, the leading Texan musicians of Race records (Figures 2 and 3).
Figure 2. Blind Willie Johnson's only known photograph on a Columbia record sleeve
109 For example, Mack McCormick’s archives which allegedly contain an image of Blind
Figure 3. Blind Lemon Jefferson's only known photograph on a Paramount record sleeve
The musicians’ blindness in the significance of their “Blind” title, then served as a contrast to the technology on which it was reproduced. While ownership of technology serves as a status symbol, during this period technologies also reaffirmed one’s location in modernity.110 This is especially relevant to marginalized communities, and phonograph ownership in African American communities was reflected in Odum and Guy Johnson’s estimate that African Americans purchased 5 to 6 million records in 1925.111 Despite the expansion in manufacturing and agriculture in the United States between 1918 and 1926, nearly two million jobs in these industries
110 Jonathan L. Walton, "The Preachers ' Blues : Religious Race Records and Claims of
Authority on Wax," Religion and American Culture 20, no. 2 (2010).
111 Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life : The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945, 126.
were eliminated as a result of technological innovations.112 This likely affected sentiments for the prospect of inclusion in the prosperity innovations offered to privileged society.
While the role of visual impairment and blindness of musicians in marketing their recordings to African American audiences are key to their significance, the effects of events in their communities were also central to their experience and expression. Their social experience of blindness in a climate of racial terror was their lived reality. The musicians’ recordings were a visible presence in Black popular culture at the height of the nadir, a backdrop of the oppression, marginalization, and disenfranchisement sustained through acts of violence and murder committed against people within their communities.