Excerpt from The Rocky Road to Dublin As singer, as composer, and as his own accompanist, he was known only to a few hundreds in a few cities East and West, but by those hundreds he will be remembered longer than many a great artist whose grave is sur mounted by a towering monument of marble. With a voice of no intrinsic beauty he had the power to make the speech of his songs music, and the songs themselves something altogether rare and lovely. A sense of humor is perhaps a dangerous gift to a singer unless he uses it discreetly - a so-called comic song being frequently the lowest form of art; but Tom Dobson's sense of humor was of an exclusive sort that belonged to him alone. One could laugh again and again at his perfectly irresistible musical (and always musicianly) pranks! There was the most delicious humor in his face, in his voice, in his fingers; indeed, his very body was eloquent with mischief when he sang certain songs of his own making. One laughed at him, and with him, wholeheartedly; but in another instant one found that all this nonsense was but the upper current of a deeper sea. A few chords, a change of theme and he made mirth seem cheap and obvious, while he touched the hearts of his hearers and made their eyes moist with unshed tears. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.