Song of the Shank is based on real events, which Jeffery Renard Allen masterfully blends with fiction to create an extraordinary novel that won both critical acclaim and numerous awards.
At the heart of the story is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African American pianist, composer, and performer who gave concerts under the stage name Blind Tom.
Born in Georgia in 1849, Tom was indeed blind. By the age of six he was already performing piano recitals. He became famous not only in the United States but also across Europe, and was the only African American musician to perform at the White House. Yet he remained largely overlooked because music scholars dismissed him as autistic and therefore not a “true” musical talent.
Tom lived and breathed music. He woke and slept with it. He cared neither about being paid, nor about whom he played for, nor whether people considered him a genius or a curiosity. The pianist who earned even more than Rubinstein, whose audiences included celebrated figures such as Mark Twain, and whom Oliver Sacks later brought back into public attention through his book An Anthropologist on Mars, was Black, blind, and autistic.
Through his distinctive literary voice, Jeffery Renard Allen succeeds both in vividly portraying Tom and in bringing to life the turbulent era in which he lived.
