BLIND TOM'S TOMBSTONE.(memorial for Thomas Greene Wiggins)(Brief Article)

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One of the more unusual deliveries made last week to the Evergreens Cemetery, in East New York, came in a truck from Steinway & Sons. The piano--an ebony grand--was set up on a square of AstroTurf under a tent in the cemetery's Pleasant Hill section. Nearby, a small, festively dressed crowd gathered around a granite tombstone--also freshly delivered--commemorating the death, ninety-four years ago, of Thomas Greene Wiggins.

Wiggins, who played the piano under the stage name Blind Tom, was in his day among the most successful entertainers in America. He routinely sold out houses from the Brooklyn Atheneum to the Denver Opera House, and in 1860 he gave a performance at the White House for President Buchanan. At his peak, he earned somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars a year--in eighteen-seventies money. Yet Wiggins himself received almost none of this. Born blind, and possibly autistic, he spent the early part of his life in slavery and the latter part essentially indentured, first to his former master, then to his master's son, and, finally, to his master's son's widow. During the Civil War, many of the proceeds of his concerts went to benefit the sick and the wounded of the Confederate Army.