Hal--

In the event that Barb doesn't see your query right away, I saw the
following Barb's site www.twainquotes.com/archangels.html,  which
includes three different citations of Twain's writing, and one second-
hand account of his awareness of Thomas Wiggins Bethnue, aka Blind Tom:


In 1869 Tom's path crossed that of Mark Twain who was traveling across
the country on his own lecture tour. Twain, who was also writing for
the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, reported that he attended
Tom's concert three nights in succession. From Mark Twain's first hand
account of Tom's performance:

"He lorded it over the emotions of his audience like an autocrat. He
swept them like a storm, with his battle-pieces; he lulled them to
rest again with melodies as tender as those we hear in dreams; he
gladdened them with others that rippled through the charmed air as
happily and cheerily as the riot the linnets make in California woods;
and now and then he threw in queer imitations of the tuning of
discordant harps and fiddles, and the groaning and wheezing of bag-
pipes, that sent the rapt silence into tempests of laughter. And every
time the audience applauded when a piece was finished, this happy
innocent joined in and clapped his hands, too, and with vigorous
emphasis."

Twain concluded his impressions of Blind Tom by writing:

"Some archangel, cast out of upper Heaven like another Satan, inhabits
this coarse casket; and he comforts himself and makes his prison
beautiful with thoughts and dreams and memories of another time... It
is not Blind Tom that does these wonderful things and plays this
wonderful music--it is the other party."

In 1875, Twain again spoke of Tom's uncanny abilities in a humorous
speech he made on the art of spelling. The text of Twain's speech
appeared in the Hartford Courant May 13, 1875 and cites Twain as
quipping:

Now there is Blind Tom, the musical prodigy. He always spells a word
according to the sound that is carried to his ear. And he is an
enthusiast in orthography. When you give him a word, he shouts it out--
puts all his soul into it. I once heard him called upon to spell
orangutang before an audience. He said, "O, r-a-n-g, orang, g-e-r,
ger, oranger, t-a-n-g, tang, orangger tang!" Now a body can respect an
orangutang that spells his name in a vigorous way like that.

Twain maintained an ongoing interest in Blind Tom's abilities. His
personal notebooks reflect occasional entries of the words "Blind Tom"
indicating that he may have planned to see more of Tom's performances
whenever the opportunity arose. In book editor Henry Holt's
autobiography titled Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor (published
by Houghton Mifflin Co., 1923) Holt recalled being with Twain one day
in Washington DC in 1885:

The afternoon of that day in Washington was drizzly, and he and I took
a constitutional under the same umbrella. He was most of the time
talking about Blind Tom, a famous half-idiotic Negro pianist of those
days. Mark said he never missed an opportunity to hear him. Tom, it
appears, used to soliloquize about himself and his music, and Mark's
memory was full of his quaint sayings, of which Mark poured out a
stream to me, and so vividly that I can't tell today whether I ever
saw and heard Tom, or whether my imagination has constructed him from
Mark's account.

Twain again wrote about Blind Tom in 1897. In Chapter Two of Following
the Equator, the book that documented Twain's around the world
journey, he wrote:

The talk passed from the boomerang to dreams - usually a fruitful
subject, afloat or ashore - but this time the output was poor. Then it
passed to instances of extraordinary memory - with better results.
Blind Tom, the negro pianist, was spoken of, and it was said that he
could accurately play any piece of music, howsoever long and
difficult, after hearing it once; and that six months later he could
accurately play it again, without having touched it in the interval.