His form when compared with
the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a
Michelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statue
is in the greater.
"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"
All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am trying
in Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps I
should speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs me
nothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as an
essential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and in
his day the most beloved of American song writers.
Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated together
on the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, when
the general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every time
I have had to listen to that blasted tune."
And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say the
same thing," meaning My Old Kentucky Home.
Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hear
the familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American
friends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forth
with the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightily
pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri of
Swiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and the group of us
stood up and sang the chorus.
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