By early August 1905 Hogan's Memphis Students had completed one hundred performances at Hammerstein's Victoria Roof Garden, and Sylvester Russell testified: "Ernest Hogan and his Memphis Students... has been the star event of the black regime this summer... [they] appealed directly to th sophisticated New Yorker's fashionable appreciation of black folk music. [...] The Memphis students had "come on [the stage] and assisted Mr Hogan in a new coon song about chicken, with mandolin and guitar accompaniment, that set the vast audience crazy".