At last comes the release of Marshfield Tornado: John Davis Plays Blind Boone, the follow-up to John Davis Plays Blind Tom, the top-ten selling, critically acclaimed CD of piano works by the Georgia slave sensation, Thomas Wiggins. With Marshfield Tornado, Davis' latest recording, John William 'Blind' Boone (1864-1927), a sightless black pianist from Missouri who modeled his career after Blind Tom's, will assume his rightful place as the last of a trio of overlapping nineteenth-century pianist/composers (before Boone came Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Blind Tom) who were seminal links between rural African-American folk culture of the Deep South and the more urban Rhythm & Blues, Jazz, and Pop styles to emerge in the twentieth century. As John Davis Plays Blind Tom did for Thomas Wiggins, Marshfield Tornado should do for Boone - draw further attention to heretofore unacknowledged American roots music and to a seminal figure in the development of twentieth-century popular music in the United States.
