[begin page 235]

Enthusiastic Eloquence

I havee modified my musical creed a little since I have enjoyed the opportunity of comparing Tommy Bree, the banjoist of the Olympican, with Gottschalk. 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.”e He gets “tum, tum,”e out of the instrumente thicker and faster than my landlady's daughter, Mary Ann; but, after all, it simply amounts to “tum, tum.”e 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 Pridean or Charley Rhoades, is as a Dashaway cocktailan 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 pillsan, 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!e

Explanatory Notes
an Olympic] The Olympic Theatre, formerly Gilbert's Melodeon, was at the corner of Clay and Kearny streets. Since 1859 it had been a leading variety house, along with the Bella Union and the Eureka Minstrel Hall.
an Sam Pride] J. Wells Kelly, Second Directory of Nevada Territory (San Francisco: Valentine and Co., 1863), lists “Pride Samuel (colored) musician, bds with Mrs. Taylor” (p. 272). He had been performing in the West at least since 1862, when the San Francisco Pacific Appeal described him as “truly the Champion Banjoist of the world. . . . His performances are inimitable” (“Sam Pride's Original Colored Minstrels,” San Francisco Pacific Appeal, 19 April 1862, p. 3).
an Dashway cocktail] The Dashaway Association, which Clemens had covered as a reporter on the Call, was a temperance organization claiming three hundred members in its San Francisco chapter. Hot whisky punches fared badly in the chorus of the association's official song: Dash! dash the cup away!
 Dash! dash the cup away!
 In brotherhood, 'tis understood,
 We'll dash, dash the cup away!

(See CofC, pp. 54–55; “Dashaway Statistics for 1864,” San Francisco Morning Call, 10 January 1865, p. 3; “The Dashaway Association,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 5 January 1865, p. 3; The Sacramento Bee's Centennial Album, Part the Sixth, pp. CC–17.)

an Brandreth's pills] “Brandreth's Vegetable Pills” were a patent medicine widely advertised for fever and ague and allegedly designed to “expel from the body all those evil geniuses that have had an agency in producing the disease” (advertisement, Golden Era 13 9 July 1865: 8).