TRANSCRIPT
So recently, I recorded a video on the amazing musician, the musician who was a former slave, Blind Tom. Perhaps the most famous performing musician of the 19th century. I recorded a video about his horrible early life—getting stuck in a box, getting sold from one slave owner to another, being locked in a box and couldn’t get out a lot of the time, being whipped and beaten, rejected terribly—and then finding a piano, finding an outlet for his genius that got put through a little pigeonhole.
Well, I like the video. I like everything I said in that video, except I realized I left some stuff out. Perhaps I left out the most important thing, and that’s how beautiful the music of Blind Tom was. I talked about his genius as a musician, the one story being the most amazing, where he could, with one hand, play one melody on the piano and another hand play a completely different melody on the piano at the same time and simultaneously sing a song, sing Dixie, a totally third separate melody at the same time. So this man could do three different things at once—genius.
But his music, the real music he created, not novelty music playing three melodies at once. Part of the problem is there are no recordings of him, so no one nowadays knows even what his music really sounded like. But later in his life, or at some point along the way, there was a musician who he traveled with who would transcribe some of his music, make sheet music out of it. And I listened to one of the pieces of sheet music that Blind Tom wrote when he was, I believe, was it 10, 11 years old, called The Battle of Manassas. It’s on the Internet, it’s on YouTube. I will link to it in the description box below.
I listened to it the first time I listened to it, especially, it was profound. It got me. There was genius, and it just—there was life, there was vibrancy, there was passion in it, and there was beauty, real beauty. And I heard the beauty. I mean, I’m not the world’s best musician, I’m not the best listener of classical music by any means, but I knew some of the melodies that he was riffing on in The Battle of Manassas. I knew this, I knew Dixie, I knew the Marseilles, the French national anthem. I think Yankee Doodle was in it, maybe there was one other one that I recognized. And then there were some improvisations, some compositions of his own that he put in there.
But what I heard, especially in his riffs on these known melodies, melodies that I knew, I realized he took them to the next level. There was just something exceptional with what he did with Dixie, just the way that he reformed it. It was clear that it was Dixie, and he did it in different, completely different ways at different parts of the song. But just with genius. I mean, I can play Dixie. As a kid, I could play it on the piano, I can play it on the guitar, I used to be able to play it on my French horn, I can sing it. What he did to it was otherworldly. I mean, I sound like an utter primitive when I play or sing Dixie next to what he did in The Battle of Manassas.
But here’s where it gets interesting. In his biography, which I read, I’ll also link to that in the description box below, in his biography there was just a quick line about Tom listening to someone play the sheet music of one of his songs. It might as well be The Battle of Manassas for my argument here, I’m going to say it is The Battle of Manassas. So I don’t know that it was, but he was listening to someone play this song, and he hated it. It drove him nuts. He was like, “No, no, no, no, no! Don’t play that! Stop! You’re killing it! You’re ruining it!”
This is what I find fascinating because the people who were around him at the time noted his reason for it. The reason was that the sheet music of his playing, the sheet music of the songs that he composed, were primitive reproductions of what he really did. What he did, according to person after person who recorded his abilities, what he could create from sounds on the piano was totally beyond anything that the sheet music of The Battle of Manassas captured.
So I realized I’m looking at the sheet music of The Battle of Manassas as pure and utter genius. It gave me just some insight into the gorgeous mind of Blind Tom, and yet from his perspective, when he looked at it, he looked at it as garbage. It was like that just shows the gulf between me and the real musician, the real mind of Blind Tom. We’re meeting halfway with this sheet music, but it’s really only halfway. His genius was a whole other permutation beyond.
And that’s what I wanted to talk about today, just how beautiful his mind was. And also how fragmented. They talked about this in the biography also, and I found it fascinating that his mind really was fragmented. His ability to play two different melodies and sing a third melody at the same time was a sign that his mind really was split into parts—not metaphorical parts, but literal parts. And I can only see that as coming from the result of trauma, having his mind, his life, his psyche smashed so early on that his basic survival depended on him breaking his mind into pieces, probably being able to tolerate the pain and the torment.
But later, in a strange way, it seemed that at least three different parts of his mind had their own consciousness—a consciousness to be able to play a melody. I mean, I can’t do that. I struggled to keep one mind that has consciousness, but in his own way, he had three. The problem was he had trouble integrating them. I think this is why it was so hard for him to function out in the world, to live, to be independent. But then again, I think he could integrate them, and perhaps to a brilliant degree, because here was an example I found in the biography. When he was playing those two separate melodies at once, melodies that had no relation to each other, he could actually merge them with each other. He could bring them together and almost make them be a harmony and a counterpoint to each other, but they were actually still two separate melodies. But he could bring them together, and then he could separate them again.
So in a way, through his music, it shows that he could integrate. So if you can’t tell, I am fascinated with Blind Tom. I’m fascinated with his mind, and I’m fascinated with what his mind tells me, tells us about the human capacity. Because this I know: he was exceptional. In some ways, he was a savant, a genius, but he was human. He was part of my species and our species. So what does this say about us, our capacity to know, to think, to do things differently, to change our ways, to have a conception of life, of what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong, to look at our own falsities? What are we capable of as a species, as individuals in this species that no one considers possible?
Because when I read about Blind Tom, I read thing after thing after thing that he did and created that I previously would have considered impossible. If I’d read it in a novel, I wouldn’t have believed it. But reading it in his biography, listening to that piece of music, knowing a bit of his backstory, I realized the human capacity to be profoundly different is even more exceptional than I’d ever thought.