John William "Blind" Boone - Biography
By Eric Brightwell
John William “Blind” Boone, perhaps more than any other musical figure in the 19th century bridged the gap between black and white music. Like Gottschalk and Big Tom before him, by writing and performing music that drew from both black and white musical traditions, he synthesized a uniquely American sound that directly influenced Missouri’s celebrated Ragtime composers like Scott Joplin, Joseph Lamb and James Scott. But whilst deservedly famous and widely recognized for his groundbreaking role during his lifetime, his reputation has faded into obscurity in the decades since, seemingly of less importance to revivalists of early American music precisely because he refused to recognize distinction between classical and popular music, a practice he referred to as “putting the cookies on the lower shelf so that everyone can get at them.”
In, 1863 a teenaged slave named Rachel Carpenter escaped from her master, William Penn Boone, and found refuge at a Union Army camp in Saline County, Missouri. There she found work as a cook. Nine months after an idyll with Company I’s bugler, Private William S. Belcher, she gave birth to John William Boone on May 17, 1864. The next day, Belcher returned to Miami, Missouri where Rachel and the baby were. But not long after, Carpenter moved to Warrensburg without Belcher, where she found employ as a housecleaner for various wealthy citizens of the town. When just six months old, “Little Willie” was diagnosed with “brain fever.” In order to alleviate the pressure created by his swelling brain, his eyeballs were scooped out and his lids sewn shut. But in later years, Boone often looked at his blindness as the primary impetus for the development of his musical talents.
A few years later, when Boone was just three, the townsfolk of Warrensburg recognized what they felt were signs of young Boone’s musicality, noting his rhythmic prowess as he banged out beats on pots and pans. At five, he was given a tin whistle which he used to imitate birdsongs. He also put together a seven-piece band of fellow toddlers, who played drums, comb and tambourine as entertainment at picnics for tips. At seven, a neighbor gave him a French harp. The following year his mother married Harrison Hendrick (or Hendrix) and she and her son joined Hendrick and his four children (Ricely, Sam, Tom and Harry and later another addition, Edward (aka Wyatt)) in his tiny one room cabin. Amazingly, their relationship endured and all remained close throughout their lives. In 1873, Boone’s mother organized a benefit to raise money to further his education. Neighbors made him new clothes and provided enough money to send and enroll him at the Missouri Institute for the Education of the Blind down river in St. Louis.
For the next two and a half years, Boone attended the school where he befriended Enoch Donley, who taught him the basics of piano. Not long after, Donley obtained an audience for the precocious Boone with the superintendent, who on the spot proclaimed Boone a genius. After a year of study, Boone reportedly was able to play from memory any composition he heard and often appeared in churches and socials. However, when a new, segregationist administration took over, Boone was taught a trade deemed more suitable for black students, broom-making. Understandably disinterested in school, Boone was often truant and headed to Chestnut Valley, a rough “tenderloin district” that cops were said to be afraid to set foot in. It was also one of the Missouri River Valley’s several cradles of ragtime, which was then fomenting in joints like Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Bar and the Hurrah Sporting Club. Eventually, Boone was expelled for truancy and rather than return home in shame, lived on the streets, playing harmonica for change. His homelessness gave him more time to spend in Chestnut Valley, but also led to his being taken into bondage by an unscrupulous gambler, Mark Cromwell. When word of his forced captivity reached home, his stepfather and several other concerned others travelled to St. Louis where they successfully procured his freedom and returned him to Warrensburg.
Back home, Boone wasted little time in continuing with his musical pursuits. He formed a trio with Tom Johnson, a Sedalia banjo player, and Ben Franklin, a tea cup artist. In exchange for travel fare, they played music on trains travelling to Mexico, Glasgow and Fayette (all in Missouri). In these small towns of the Bluegrass Region and Little Dixie, they performed in local churches. In 1878, in nearby Columbia, the fifteen year old Boone was invited to play at the Second Baptist Church in the Sharp End neighborhood at a concert organized by a prominent figure in the local black community, builder and contractor John Lange, Jr.
On March 3rd of 1880, Boone returned to Columbia where he performed at Garth Hall in a playoff against a 31-year-old blind autist, Thomas Wiggins Bethune, then famous around the world as “Blind Tom.” Blind Tom had entertained President Buchanan at age eleven and toured Europe at sixteen, becoming renowned for his several thousand song repertoire and considerable technical skill. Boone supposedly matched Tom note for note and (probably apocryphal) newspaper accounts stated that Blind Tom stormed off the stage in frustration. Boone entertained audiences with compositions by Sigismond Thalberg and Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a white Creole-Jewish composer whose classical compositions were among the first to reflect the influence of black music. Despite Boone’s obvious skill, it was felt by Lang that he could improve even more and he enrolled at Columbia’s Christian College where he studied under Anna Heuerman, who introduced him to the works of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. He later enrolled with Mrs. M. R. Samson of Iowa State Teacher’s College.
With the completion of Boone’s education, Lange organized the J. W. Boone Music Co., a traveling group with showcased acts including fiddlers, banjo players and singers (including Miss Emma Smith, Miss Josephine Huggard, Mme. Marguerite Day, Stella May and Melissa Fuell. With the motto, “Merit, not sympathy, wins” Lange seemed to consciously attempt distance himself from Blind Tom’s managers, who had previously owned him as a slave and degradingly exploited him as both a “mental defective” and “the eighth wonder of the world” to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves. But Blind Boone was influenced by Tom himself, originally billed as “Blind John” and performing several of his compositions. And though the performers weren’t exploited offensively like Blind Tom, there was a hint of sideshow aspect, with Lange offering a thousand dollars to anyone who could stump Boone’s efforts in reproducing any piece of music he heard. Also like Blind Tom, Boone also did tricks like play two songs whilst singing another simultaneously, all in different keys.
The first concert of the Boone Company was held on January 18th, 1880 at St. Paul's Methodist Church in Jefferson City, Missouri. At it, Boone played selections of Liszt (his favorite composer) and Beethoven. In April, the Marshfield Tornado killed 105 people, Boone created a programmatic piece (based on Blind Tom’s “Battle of Manassas”) which incorporated musical approximations of thunder and wind. The song became the centerpiece of his performances. Unfortunately for future generations, Boone refused to allow either its transcription or publication or piano roll, wanting to limit the experience of his centerpiece to live, paying audiences. Throughout their existence, the company encountered many obstacles, including three fires, two train wrecks, fund shortages and not in the least, segregation which often necessitated playing an early performance for a white audience followed by one for blacks.
In 1885, Boone assumed full partnership with Lange. By then, The J.W. Boone Company was pulling between $150 and $600 per performance and, at his peak, Boone earned $17,000 a year. By 1888, their fame was widespread and the company received glowing press. In 1889, Boone married Lange's sister, Eugenia, who frequently traveled with him on his tours, and they bought a home in Sharp End. In their early days, the company lugged pianos from town to town on a horse-drawn wagon, eventually going through sixteen. In 1891, Chickering & Sons produced a custom, oak-encased model dubbed “Big U” to withstand the journeys and performances. Whilst most described Blind Boone as a modest and generous man, he did take pride for putting more roofs on Columbia’s churches than anyone else. Perhaps surprising for a blind man, he stunted and flossed pretty hard, usually wearing a suit covered in medals (showing his allegiance to several fraternal organizations) and flashing gold rings, a diamond-studded cross and a huge, jewel-encrusted pocket watch with a built-in chime. Though pulling in lots of money, he saved little. In 1912, he was commissioned by the QRS Piano Roll Company and he recorded “Woodland Murmurs,” “Sparkling Spring,” “Rag Medley No. 1,” and “Blind Boone’s Southern Rag Medley No. 2.”
The J.W. Boone Company flourished in the 1890s and 1900s, touring Canada, Mexico and the US where they performed six nights a week in churches and concert halls. He entertained his audiences, whether integrated or not, with a mix of classical music, coon songs, mazurkas, plantation melodies, polkas, ragtime and spirituals. When Lange died (of a cerebral hemorrhage resulting from injuries sustained in an automobile accident) in 1916, bookings and finances began to decline. Around the same time, with the proliferation of film and then radio, concert halls ceased to be the primary source of entertainment for most people and ragtime’s successor, jazz, began to overtake it in terms of musical popularity. First, company member Marguerite Day took over as manager. Boone’s final tour of the east was in 1919 and he played Harvard, Yale, New York and DC. By 1920, Boone was reduced to performing mostly in small-town public schools in and around Missouri for a flat fee of $40 a show. A Columbia music publisher, Wayne B. Allen, became his manager and got him to record for Cincinnati-based Vocal Style Company, but they weren’t released. Having saved little, Boone was forced to sell off his properties in Columbia and Warrensburg.
On May 31, 1927, Blind Boone performed his final concert. On October 4, at his brother Samuel’s home, he was struck with apoplexy and died. By then, his estate amounted to only $132.65. Though there had been black composers of classical music before, like Francis “Frank” Johnson Isaac Hazzard, Aaron J.R. Connor and Henry F. Williams, it arguably wasn’t until Blind Boone that a composer so successfully and completely integrated European, African, rural and urban, classical and popular influences. Recognition of Boone has occurred here and there. In Kansas City, Missouri’s Vine district (another hotbed of ragtime and later jazz), “Kansas City’s finest outdoor theater for colored people,” the Highland Garden Theater was enclosed in the ‘30s and renamed the Boone Theater. In 1960, one of the projects in Columbia was named after Boone. In 1961, the Blind Boone Memorial Foundation was formed and a concert was organized to promote interest. However, after it failed to generate enough money to pay featured musician Bob Darch’s fee, he took Big U as payment. Boone’s grave remained unmarked until 1971, when the Boone County Sesquicentennial Commission raised enough money to buy a headstone for Boone and his wife. In 1980, Boone’s home and five other structures related to him were placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Unfortunately, given his importance to the development of American music, his legend is remains obscure, although several CDs, Marshfield Tornado: John Davis Plays Blind Boone (2008-Newport Classic), and the work of fellow Miami, Missouri native Frank Townsell’s Blind Boone's Piano Music (2007-Laurel Record) both illustrate with clean, sensitive, nuanced playing the wonderful charms of Blind Boone’s music. With the initial ragtime revival of the 1970s, Blind Boone was perhaps too diverse for the purity-minded who favored his less adventurous followers.
