Some albums arrive with a story attached to them. Others are almost entirely story. Blind Boone: The Musical sits somewhere between the two, taking the remarkable life of John William “Blind” Boone and transforming it into an ambitious song cycle that reaches across ragtime, blues, jazz, funk, rock and musical theatre. Its as much about resurrecting a forgotten musical legacy as it is in telling a compelling story.
John William Boone was born in 1864 in a Union Army camp near Miami, Missouri, the son of an escaped enslaved woman and a Union Army bugler. At only six months old, his eyes were removed during an operation intended to save his life. Yet blindness proved no barrier to an extraordinary musical career. Boone would become a celebrated concert pianist, performing across America from 1880 until 1927 at a time when segregation and institutional racism made the world of concert performance extraordinarily difficult to navigate for African American musicians.
