Those were days of music for Californians who
knew how to make it and we should always have the greatest pride in
recounting these magnificent efforts.
In the year 1874, when Madam Anna Bishop was making her American tour,
she included San Francisco, and with her troupe came also Alfred
Wilkie, tenor, and Frank Gilder of New York, an organist and pianist
of high repute. He was a genius in a class of his own. As the Salt
Lake papers said of him, "Frank Gilder, who can snatch more music out
of a piano than Beethoven could write in a week, is with the Lingard
Company and will play a number of solos tonight. He is an entire
orchestra, a sort of a condensed brass band, and those who don't hear
him will never know what pianos were invented for." This was a unique
"ad.", but was just about right. I was employed by him when he
inaugurated his popular twenty-five-cent concerts. He gave thirty-six
in the course and I sang twenty-five times for him. I sang one evening
at one of Madam Bishop's concerts, and after he heard me sing Gatty's
Fair Dove (my ghost song, as he called it) he planned out these
concerts--something out of the ordinary. Each artist received ten
dollars, no matter how high he stood in his calling, or the prices he
received from other managers. That was the order of things and each
one who sang must take that or not sing. We began in the hall of the
Y.M.C.A. on Sutter street. The following artists appeared: Mrs.
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