| I like Gottschalk well enough. He probably gets as much out of the piano
as there is in it. But the frozen fact is, that all that he does get out
of it is "tum, tum." He gets "tum, tum," out of the
instrument thicker and faster than my landlady's daughter, Mary Ann; but,
after all, it simply amounts to "tum, tum." As between Gottschalk
and Mary Ann, it is only a question of quantity; and so far as quantity
is concerned, he beats her three to one. The piano may do for love-sick
girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and
slate pencils. But give me the banjo. Gottschalk compared to Sam Pride or
Charley Rhoades, is as a Dashaway cocktail to a hot whisky punch. When you
want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad
quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you
like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles,
and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,
-- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming
banjo! - "Enthusiastic Eloquence," San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 23 June 1865 |
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