This is a recording of an 1885 song called “Slightly on the Mash”. It’s a happy number for drinking, dancing and goofing off.
MP3:
Slightly on the Mash Schottische
(1:53)
written by
A. G. Send,
arranged for guitar by the enigmatic
E. Pique,
and
published by
J. Oettl
.
I didn’t find any biographical info or other work by these people.
The performance is
guitar playing
by L. Gonze, a.k.a. me,
and the recoding was released on May 7, 2008.
The Guadalupe Watershed was an area of intense activity during the California Gold Rush, with the quicksilver mines within Santa Clara County supporting the gold refinement process.Maybe Pianissimo was a musician who had gone west to strike it rich.
Dancing
This song is a dance called a schottische. Per Wikipedia, Schottische was popular in Victorian era ballrooms (part of the Bohemian “folk-dance” craze) and left its traces in folk music of countries as distant as France, Spain (chotis), Portugal (choutiça), Italy and Sweden.
Musically this is an intricate little tune which feels like an evolutionary step on the way to ragtime and eventually jazz. Wikipedia says At the start of the 20th century in the Southern United States the schottische was combined with ragtime; the most popular “ragtime schottische” of the era was “Any Rags” by Thomas S. Allen in 1902.
If you want to dance along at home, it goes like this: step step step hop, step step step hop, step hop step hop step hop step hop. Posh dancers did it like this:
Knuckledraggers were probably more like this:
Playing along
Free culture
There is code to embed a player for the song in another web page: