This appreciation of the banjo music played by Tommy Bree, Charley Rhoades, and Sam Pride appeared in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle on 23 June 1865. The Chronicle editors introduced it with these words: “Mark Twain, who occasionally condescends to drop in at the Academy of Music, though as a general thing he prefers negro minstrelsy to Italian opera, thus puts on record his sentiments with reference to the comparative merits of the banjo and the piano.” But the article, brief as it is, was more than that: it was a reiteration of Clemens' preference for the “spirit of cheerfulness” over the “powers of dreariness,” which he had expressed in “A Voice for Setchell” (no. 104) just one month before.

Tommy Bree, the popular ballad singer whom Clemens praised in the sketch, had opened at the Olympic Theatre only two days earlier. Charley Rhoades, another Pacific Coast banjo player (whose musical career had begun in the California mining camps), had been featured at the same theater for three months prior to Bree's appearance. Sam Pride, who was black (unlike most performers in “negro minstrelsy”), had been known to Clemens at least since April 1863, when the author mentioned him in his local column for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, saying that he had just “heard Sam. Pride's banjo make a very excellent speech in English to the audience” at La Plata Hall.1 Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a distinguished concert pianist who had opened in San Francisco on 10 May 1865, was, in Clemens' eyes, no match for these experts on “the glory-beaming banjo!”

“Enthusiastic Eloquence” is the first acknowledged sketch that [begin page 234] Clemens published in the Chronicle. The paper referred to the article, in a mysteriously facetious postscript, as “the foregoing extract,” and the word “extract” might imply that the Chronicle had reprinted only one item from a longer letter in the Enterprise. But on balance, it seems probable that “Enthusiastic Eloquence” had not been previously published: Bree had opened at the Olympic only two days before the sketch appeared in the Chronicle—insufficient time for it to travel to Virginia City and return in the Enterprise. The likelihood is strong that the sketch was either lifted from a manuscript destined for the Enterprise, or else written casually, as part of an article on San Francisco entertainments, for the Chronicle. Michael H. de Young, cofounder of the paper, recalled that Clemens was one of “those Bohemians” who “hung around” the office and wrote for the newspaper, “though paid no regular salaries.” De Young said that Clemens even had “desk room with us . . . and made his headquarters in our office.”2 This recollection probably applies to the circumstances under which the present sketch was written and published, for in October 1865 Clemens would join the Chronicle on a more formal basis, earning $40 a month for dramatic criticisms.