2 ELITE SYNCOPATIONS: SCOTT JOPLIN AND RAGTIME

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Ragtime was America’s pulse. It just took a while for Americans to find it.

In 1900 European music, whether Mozart or Marie Lloyd, was the real thing as far as New York was concerned; American music was as nothing, trivial, an embarrassment. To get over this hump, and for twentieth-century pop to begin, white America had to acknowledge that African American music existed. Enter ragtime. In contrast to the family of musics that were merely popular, ragtime was identifiably ‘pop’. Emerging in the last years of the nineteenth century, it was urban, it was democratic, it was innovative and it had a strong African American influence. It had a beat, it had syncopation. All of these things were unusual.

Ragtime set the template for every successive twentieth-century pop boom. For a start, it immediately made you want to dance. This really wasn’t true of Victorian parlour songs or Sousa marches or music hall or even Viennese waltzes. Toe-tappers didn’t really exist before ragtime. Secondly, the heyday of classic ragtime had the lifespan of a butterfly; it would be messed about with and commercialised, to the horror of its originators, but to the benefit of pop’s advancement. Thirdly, it didn’t have rules (even though some people did write ragtime rule books), because no one wanted ragtime to be homework; it was fun, it was anti-snob, it was the soundtrack to good times. Fourthly, it was a threat – to morals, to public decency, and most of all to other musicians. Most significantly, it was a black music that would be transformed by the music industry, rewritten – with both zip and slightness – into a more digestible, more widely appreciated form.

It was also a target for the press, and music-hall songs ridiculed it. It was supposedly a flash in the pan – so why wouldn’t it just go away? Ragtime, once it became a piano-based music, also attracted women to compose popular songs, since the piano in the home was primarily there for wives and children. In addition, it crossed music’s racial borders, which in the nineteenth century had been rigid and ugly. Ragtime was, at heart, instrumental, and so it was open to blacks, whites, professionals and amateurs alike. Lastly, it had pop’s first tragic figure, its own lost boy, the beautiful mind which could take no more. For James Carr or Donny Hathaway, Nick Drake or Kurt Cobain, read Scott Joplin. He felt the full prejudicial headwind for black composers. The pervasive legacy of minstrelsy and the coon song would provide the dark floor for Americans in the American century, and Joplin, ragtime’s greatest figure, would become its saddest victim. As well as many of the good things to come in pop, the ragtime era also highlighted how black America would struggle to impose itself, would see its culture nipped and tucked by the music industry, and would watch any potential profits inevitably go elsewhere.

Where did ragtime come from? Geographically, the Mississippi basin in the 1890s. Like New York’s Tin Pan Alley a couple of decades on, and Liverpool’s Merseybeat in the 1960s, it was a result of immigration and trade creating a fluid society with a need for innovation to make ends meet.

Why did it catch fire? What set it apart from the popular music that had gone before? Rhythm – the explicit beat, America’s heartbeat – was everything in this new music. You could play behind it, melodies and harmonies could twist around it, and the key word was ‘syncopation’ – in other words, putting an irregular beat over a regular beat. In ragtime the melody itself was fully syncopated; tune and rhythm were inseparable. It used oompah basslines taken from marching music and set melodies against them in ‘ragged time’, breaking free of conventional Western bar structures. In the European tradition, percussion had always been an afterthought.

Syncopation was created by the pianist’s left hand creating a regular ‘boom-chick boom-chick’ rhythmic melody to get you on your feet. So completely did its relentless, euphoric sound mesmerise a turn-of-the-century audience used to maudlin ballads and cartoonish depictions of black entertainers that ‘ragtime’ was in the dictionary by 1902 – a ‘rag-time girl’ being either a ‘sweetheart’ or a ‘harlot’. All ways up, ragtime signified fun.I

The written and recorded form would be the making of ragtime, its mass-produced driver. If it lost a little in translation from the bordello to the page, or from the bar-room to the studio and ultimately onto a shellac 78, then that was part of what made it new, industrialised and American. These ephemeral distortions were an essential part of what made it pop.

In the beginning you could hear it only in bars and bordellos. It was true tenderloin music. The first man to try and capture it from the smoky air, to write ragtime music down on paper, was Ben Harney, who had been born on a riverboat somewhere between Louisville, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 1872. Harney was white. He didn’t invent ragtime and didn’t claim to be the ‘father of ragtime’ (though he didn’t mind too much when he was publicised as such), but he thought of himself as an adoptive parent. In 1896 the sheet music for Harney’s ‘You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon but You Done Broke Down’ stated that he was the ‘Original Introducer to the Stage of the Now Popular “Rag Time” in Ethiopian Song’. Harney moved to New York in 1896 and became a regular at Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theatre, where the New York Clipper wrote that he ‘jumped into immediate favour through the medium of his genuinely clever plantation negro imitations and excellent piano playing’. Before the year was out, the ‘rag time pianist’ had also played the Weber and Fields Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House, spreading the popularity of ragtime music like jam. He published his Rag Time Instructor in 1897. A white man who could shout the blues, who wrote and produced an all-black variety show called Ragtime Reception, Harney was a groundbreaker and was appreciated as such. Until the rise of Al Jolson in the 1910s, he was also the highest-paid popular musician in America.

The ‘rules’ of ragtime would become part of its marketing. A Swede called Axel Christensen set up a school in Chicago that offered ‘ragtime taught in ten lessons’. He may as well have added, ‘and then you can get the money, and then you get the girls’. The ragtime pianist was the thing to be, and Christensen would end up as the ‘dean of ragtime’, with more than fifty schools across the States. ‘In 1902 and 1903 there was no accepted method or system of playing ragtime. No two pianists ever played syncopated numbers alike,’ he claimed, quite proud that he had brought some order and clarity to proceedings. Ragtime’s high-pop crossover would be where the music took off. Its specific technique would turn out to be nowhere near as powerful as the unhitched idea of ragtime.

An absolute precursor of ragtime was bandleader John Philip Sousa. Many rags would basically be marches composed for the piano, with added syncopation.

There may have been no acclaimed indigenous American music in 1900, but recognisable styles were emerging, and the most popular music that could be called ‘American’ was that of the marching band. The most primitive early data for record sales in the 1890s have Sousa at number one for pretty much the entire decade. Among the most instantly recognisable tunes are ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, ‘The Washington Post’ and ‘The Liberty Bell’, which had an afterlife as the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In 1868, aged thirteen, Sousa had tried to run away to join a circus band; instead, his father enlisted him as an apprentice in the United States Marine Band. The boy did well and ended up running the Marine Band from 1880 to 1892, but only recorded with them for the last two years. That didn’t stop them cutting 229 titles for Columbia in those two years. Whether Sousa made it to the studio or not, they bore his name, an early trademark of distinction in the fledgling record industry. In spite of the fame and prestige that records brought him, he didn’t like them, coining the phrase ‘canned music’ to describe them. Possibly with his military hat on, in 1906 he wrote: ‘Canned music is as incongruous by a campfire as canned salmon by a trout stream.’ To give Sousa his due, his thin, acoustic recordings must have sounded as awe-inspiring as tinned pilchards compared to the pumping presence of a real live band. Either way, there are more than a thousand recordings listed in the Sousa Band discography.

As well as providing circus tent ‘screamers’,II military music was also seen as suitable for dancing, and Sousa provided both ‘two-steps’ (‘Washington Post’, from 1889, and ‘Triton March’, from 1896) and ‘cakewalks’ (borrowed from African American culture). Not satisfied with being the king of popular music, he decided to take his work into the realm of the classical. This would become a regular move for popular musicians who had reached the top of the tree, from Scott Joplin to George Gershwin to Paul McCartney, but Sousa was the first. He worked on suites, beginning with The Last Days of Pompeii in 1893, and following it with At the King’s Court (1904) and Dwellers of the Western World (1910). Just to remind us that these were less enlightened times and that even the lowest socially acceptable popular culture was still entirely white, the Dwellers suite was divided into three movements: ‘The Red Man’ is itchy, like skittering mice or cartoon-baddie music; ‘The White Man’ is stately, regal, impossible to dance to, more there to accompany the swishing of gowns; ‘The Black Man’ is at least recognisably southern, a cakewalk, and easily the catchiest piece. But by 1910 Sousa would have struggled to hide his source material.

As fashions changed, the military bands adapted. The Victor Recording Company’s house Military Band would be put to use on a bunch of dance records from 1911, as the turkey trot, tango and foxtrot were introduced to America in the immediate pre-war years. The record labels dictated their purpose, stating ‘for dancing’, ‘trot or one step’ and even – in a proto-disco move, pre-dating beats per minute – ‘60 bars per minute’. The Victor Military Band cut the first recorded version of W. C. Handy’s ‘St Louis Blues’, as well as Eubie Blake’s ‘Bugle Call Rag’ and patriotic numbers like the Caruso-written ‘Liberty Forever’. They fell from favour only when the viola-and-piano-led society orchestras, like those of Victor’s Joseph C. Smith and James Reese Europe, became more fashionable at dances in around 1916, ushering in the 1920s sounds of Paul Whiteman and Isham Jones. By the time electric recording arrived in the mid-’20s – a means of truly communicating a marching band’s power – military bands were seen as antiques, a relic of a pre-war, more militarily innocent age. The Victor Military Band’s last record was released in 1919, but they’d had a pretty good run.

Before ragtime appeared as sheet music, there for posterity and archival hounds like me, it went undocumented; there was no Cecil Sharp or John Lomax lurking in saloons and bordellos to record whatever the pianist was playing.III Every saloon bar in America had a piano, which provided a ready source of employment for anyone who could play it. Usually, they would try and blend into the wallpaper, playing familiar tunes and never refusing a punter’s request. Somehow, freelance itinerants invented the style, playing whatever bawdy noise suited their surroundings, but it was Scott Joplin who decided it was something more than a soundtrack for boozing, scrapping, ogling and groping.

Joplin was pop music’s original Entertainer. His ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ was published by the local sheet-music publisher, John Stark, in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1899,IV and it was the first piece of sheet music to sell a million copies. It was stately, but it had an unmistakable wink; it was sweet, but genuinely uplifting – it made you want to hold your head high. Also, it was incredibly catchy, what music-lovers a hundred years on would call an earworm. Alongside the murk, morbidity and melted butter of turn-of-the-century American balladry, it came across like a freshwater fountain. Stark took the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ two hundred miles east, to St Louis, where he sold half a million copies of it and started a craze which went national, then international. It was the biggest ragtime hit of all. More than Ben Harney, more than anyone else, Joplin was the genre’s creator and its leading light, and his ‘The Entertainer’, published in 1901, would sell two million copies as the theme from 1973’s The Sting. There’s longevity for you.V

Yet ragtime’s agency would be constantly doubted. There are no contemporary accounts praising a bright new musical genre, just queries over how ‘real’ it was. In this way, too, it broke fresh ground: more than a century on, pop is still confronted with questions of authenticity, seriousness, whether it’s too mechanised, whether it lacks heart. Fun, especially populist fun, isn’t enough for some people. While he conceded the music was ‘brimming over with life’, novelist Arnold Bennett described ragtime as ‘the music of the hustler, of the feverishly active speculator, of the skyscraper and the grain elevator’. All of this and more was thrown at ragtime, and Scott Joplin bore the brunt of it.

Joplin was responsible for making ragtime the first true American music, and his tunes gave it lasting significance. He had been born in Texas in 1868, the son of a former slave, and played the piano from an early age. By the time he was in his teens he was playing across the Midwest in boarding houses, casinos and bars. The first pop music would be born, like so many later genres, in the underworld.

Many American cities had a ‘tenderloin’ district where men and women, blacks and whites could mix freely. Joplin found himself in Sedalia. It was a railroad town, and so had a pretty lively nightlife. It also had a college for black students, where Joplin would learn advanced counterpoint by day while earning money playing a cheeky piano at the Maple Leaf Bar by night. One night, a music-store owner called John Stark walked into the bar and heard Joplin playing a tune. Stark introduced himself and asked Joplin if the melody was his own. They struck a deal, and Stark published it; the tune was called ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. With a bit of money now in his pocket, the serious-minded Joplin set himself up as a teacher in St Louis.

The American public would discover ragtime through a dance craze: the cakewalk. This had been started by black workers on plantations as they imitated and lampooned the formal European dances of the white plantation owners. It was a caricature, but as a spectacle it took on a life of its own. The cakewalk became part of the minstrel show and was in major vogue in the mid-1890s, with raggy compositions like Sadie Green’s ‘Cakewalk’ (1896). Joplin had the idea of writing specifically for the cakewalk and other neo-folk dances, like the two-step and the slow drag. He created The Ragtime Dance, a modern folk ballet, in 1902. Stark initially refused to publish it, fearing it was too ambitious and wouldn’t sell. Wasn’t ragtime meant to be simple good-time music? Wasn’t that why it was popular? After his daughter Nell convinced him to publish the nine sheets of music, Stark’s fears were borne out when The Ragtime Dance flopped. This didn’t stop Joplin from aiming high, his aspirations to serious music revealed by the subtitles of later tunes like ‘Bethena: A Concert Rag’ (1905) and ‘Fig Leaf Rag: A High Class Rag’ (1908).

Minstrelsy would have been a constant presence in Joplin’s life, whereas for us today it is simply an unfortunate pop-cultural flavour which we can choose to ignore. It was the key to the entire framework of American vaudeville culture for many decades, through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a language everyone spoke and shared. It was culturally strong as well as culturally nasty; the minstrel archetypes – stock characters like Zip Coon, the Interlocutor, Tambo and Bones – and topics like razor fights offered a powerful and seductive comedic structure. This culture was a limiting framework within which you could nonetheless flourish as a black performer or writer, despite the self-evident moral morass. Some of the biggest ‘coon song’ hits were by black writers, including the most famous (and to modern ears most repellent), Ernest Hogan’s 1899 hit ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’. This is what Joplin was fighting against when he was trying to get ragtime taken seriously, not only as pop music, but as a cultural representation of black America. His high ideals would cause him huge heartache in the future.

Joplin aside, who else was out there writing this music? In Kansas City there was Charles L. Johnson, who wrote the insanely uplifting ‘Dill Pickles’. It was published by the Carl Hoffman Music Company in Kansas City, Missouri, the same outfit that had published Scott Joplin’s ‘Original Rags’. It was a sheet-music million-seller, the second after ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, and it single-handedly pushed ragtime’s popularity up another level in 1906, just as it was starting to wane.

Then there was James Scott, a song plugger at a music shop in Carthage, Missouri, who wrote rags in his spare time. In 1905 he travelled to St Louis to find his hero, Scott Joplin, and play him one of his tunes. Joplin was impressed. John Stark published the ‘Frog Legs Rag’ in 1906, and it became the best-selling tune in the Stark catalogue, after ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. ‘Everybody called [James Scott] “Little Professor”,’ remembered Scott’s cousin Patsy. ‘He always walked rapidly looking at the ground, would pass you on the street and never see you, always deep in thought.’

In Baltimore, there was child prodigy Eubie Blake, whose parents had bought him a pump organ when he was just five. By the time he was a teenager he was playing in bordellos, as well as in church, and by 1912, aged twenty-five, he was on the vaudeville circuit playing his own ragtime tunes, such as ‘Charleston Rag’. He also played with James Reese Europe’s feted Society Orchestra, who accompanied the white dancing sensations Vernon and Irene Castle. Blake’s stab at immortality would be achieved with another black vaudeville act, Noble Sissle, and their 1921 all-black Broadway revue Shuffle Along, which included the deathless, post-ragtime ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry’.

Another Joplin fan, Joseph Lamb, was of Irish descent and lived in New Jersey. He shared Joplin’s love of long, classical phrases. Lamb took piano lessons from a priest at school in Ontario, but quit after a few weeks because ‘the good father had nothing to offer Joe’. He took it for granted that ragtime was a respectable pursuit, something his hero Joplin could never do.VI

Joplin’s muse may have been leading him to think of a rag opera, but with the demand for more rags came commercial necessity. Other songwriters were less high-minded, and New York’s new publishing companies were happy to take advantage. You were only a marginally capable piano player, hoping to keep the wife and kids entertained? Write a rag, man! One writer who simplified the Joplin style and considerably sped up the ragtime tempo – a classic pop move – was George Botsford. His ‘Black and White Rag’ would be revived decades later as the manic, joyous theme to the BBC’s snooker show Pot Black.

After John Stark, the most significant – and commercially savvy – publisher of ragtime was Charles Neil Daniels, who managed America’s biggest music publisher, Jerome H. Remick. A pianist, he had been noted at college for his exquisite pen-and-ink manuscripts. In 1901, while managing the sheet-music department of the Barr Dry Goods Company in St Louis, he wrote a song called ‘Hiawatha’. Daniels was offered the unheard-of sum of $10,000 for it by Detroit-based Jerome H. Remick; with this came the offer to manage Remick’s company. He accepted, and words were added to ‘Hiawatha’, creating a tableau of a simple, primitivist West. ‘Hiawatha’ sold millions of copies, kick-starting a craze for Tin Pan Alley-penned ‘Indian’ songs: ‘Feather Queen’, ‘Valley Flower’, ‘Golden Deer’, ‘Red Wing’ (based on a Robert Schumann melody), ‘Silver Heels’ (about ‘the sweetest and the neatest little girl’) and others, all glorious, whitewashed fabrications. Lyrics tended to revolve around ‘heap much kissing’, and the craze lasted right up until the outbreak of World War I. But Daniels wasn’t interested in writing more faux-Native songs, because he was a ragtime fan, pure and simple; he even encouraged his staff to write rags and scoured small towns for locally published work. Remick eventually published five hundred rags, roughly a sixth of all published ragtime songs, and Daniels nurtured ragtime with a fan’s enthusiasm and a businessman’s nous. (He was also smart enough to realise motion pictures were going to make more money than sheet music and wrote a song for Mickey, a Mack Sennett film starring Mabel Normand in 1919. It would become the first-ever film theme.)

Ragtime began its spread across Europe in 1900, when John Philip Sousa introduced it as part of his repertoire on his first overseas tour. Vess Ossman, the banjo player, came over playing rags later the same year. Things moved slowly, and though the ragtime-associated dances like the turkey trot, the bunny hug and the grizzly bear crossed the Atlantic, it wasn’t until 1912 that the Original American Ragtime Octet reached Britain. Without witnessing American musicians playing the music, Europeans had found it hard to grasp its syncopation, but seeing the real deal made all the difference. Also in 1912, a British revue called Hullo Ragtime became the first of many, with more than seventy rag-based revues running in Britain by 1913. Music hall was not allergic to the new music’s charms, and Marie Lloyd’s ‘Piccadilly Trot’ was gently ragtime-influenced, even if it did claim the territory for its own: ‘No doubt you’ve heard about the turkey trot, some say it’s rot, some say it’s not. Well, I’ve got another one that beats the lot, and it doesn’t come from Yankeeland.’ Nevertheless, it was seen by many as a fad and didn’t entirely revolutionise British dance culture, which was still largely based on waltzes. Right up until World War I broke out, dance programmes were still printed with threads and came with tiny pencils. Take a look at one and it might reveal the occasional two-step, but outside of the music halls everything dance-related was still put together with military precision. The dancefloor revolution in Europe would have to wait a while.

What did ragtime recordings sound like in the early scuffling days of the music industry? Those from the first decade of the twentieth century tended to feature either a banjo (accompanied by military band or piano), piccolo, accordion or xylophone – all high, percussive instruments that would cut through the grit and hiss of early 78s. The first ragtime record with solo piano – ‘Everybody Two Step’ by Mike Bernard – was released as late as 1912. Bernard was the orchestra leader at Tony Pastor’s Music Hall in New York; back in 1900, he had won a ragtime piano-playing competition sponsored by the Police Gazette and been rewarded with a diamond-studded medal that proclaimed him ‘Ragtime King of the World’.

Once ragtime became an international craze, it was inevitable that things like subtlety and nuance would get lost in the rush and that writers would start adding lyrics for extra catchiness. Tin Pan Alley simplified ragtime, which may have wrinkled the noses of purists, but ensured its survival as the prime pop trend right up to 1917: hits included ‘Trouble Rag’, ‘Jungle Town Rag’, ‘Chocolate Creams Rag’, ‘Ragtime Insanity’, ‘Mop Rag’ and ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’. The latter was a miracle in that it squeezed together two trends: one for modernist ragtime, and another for melancholic, nostalgic cowboy songs. Mostly, lyrics gabbed on about just how super ragtime was. Even Scott Joplin was paired up with a Tin Pan Alley hack lyricist called Joe Snyder in 1910 for the self-absorbed ‘Pine Apple Rag’: ‘That tune is certainly divine… Hear me sigh, hear me cry for that “Pine Apple Rag”… Isn’t that a wonderful tune?’ Enough, already!

The outbreak of World War I would prove to be the beginning of the end for ragtime, as patriotic songs took over, while a new music called ‘jass’ – or ‘jazz’ – would be all the rage once peace had come. But the war did inspire a raggy unity anthem, Anna Chandler’s ‘The Dance of All Nations Ragtime Ball’. A mezzo-soprano, Chandler had been born on 4 July 1884 in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, an early American settlement which was famous for little more than its annual apple festival. But Chandler sounded like a heap of new urban fun, a woman out of time, born a little too early for the Jazz Age. Though she tries to hide it, her vaudeville diction is quite apparent as she does her bit for world peace. There are ‘brown-skin gals’, Irish jigs and an obscure French move or two, while ‘a pair of would-be Castles spinned round like a top. They wouldn’t stop until she dropped.’ Chandler dropped ragtime after the war, like almost everyone else, and sang exclusively in Italian and Hebrew on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit right through to the 1940s.

The music became a victim of its bad press. Though syncopation had set ragtime apart, made it modern and cakewalk-friendly, a common misunderstanding was that there was nothing more to it than a boom-chick bassline, and therefore you could ‘rag’ any old song you liked. In Britain, the pianist with the travelling Original American Ragtime Octet, Melville Gideon, recorded ‘Ragtime Improvisation on Rubinstein’s Melody in F’ for HMV in 1912. Ragging the classics became a parlour game. Irving Berlin had early success with this gimmick on ‘That Mesmerising Mendelssohn Tune’ in 1909, a syncopated take on Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’. The biggest hit of all was Berlin’s ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ in 1911, which disgusted Scott Joplin, who had recently arrived in New York, and made him more determined than ever to have ragtime taken seriously as an American classical music. The industry’s sniffy attitude to the style, though, was epitomised by Louis A. Hirsch’s 1912 recording ‘Bacchanal Rag’: ‘Take some music, start to fake some music in a lag time, then you have some ragtime. Steal from the masters any classic you see, rag it a little bit with his melody…’ Unable to compete with cut-throat New York competition, John Stark closed his office and moved back to St Louis.

Ragtime didn’t completely die out after World War I, not in its classic form. As Tin Pan Alley moved on to jazz and beyond, the way was clear for the ragtime classicists to resume their positions. And in Jelly Roll Morton, they found a brand-new champion, one who was happy to embellish his part in the story of jazz and pass anecdotes on for ethnographers like Alan Lomax, who ensured the legends were preserved, writ large. In the twenty-first century, original ragtime sounds more modern than what came immediately after because we’re used to hearing it on piano rolls rather than scratchy, acoustic-era 78s. Enthusiasts and clubs abound. Since the 1970s, ragtime – Scott Joplin’s work in particular – has been issued on classical record labels; these vinyl albums would be the music’s cultural redemption. But all this came far too late for Joplin.VII

He had written A Guest of Honour in 1903, an opera for the St Louis World’s Fair, and was distraught when the fair was cancelled (any manuscripts have long since disappeared). The lure of official acceptance, of a move away from mere pop and a welcome into the classical fold, obsessed Joplin.

Treemonisha, a didactic opera about what Joplin called ‘the coming of age of the black race’, was finished in 1911 and ran to some 230 pages. John Stark turned it down. It contained Victorian parlour songs and extended dialogues on the betterment of black folk, and there was barely a rag in sight. You couldn’t blame Stark – what was a third-rate Verdi compared to a first-rate Joplin? It played once in a hall in Harlem, with Joplin playing all of the orchestral parts on piano, with no costumes, no funding, no other musicians. As a black pioneer, he experienced shut-outs and disrespect whatever he did: the classical world shut him out and, after a while, so did the popular market. There was no space in between for Scott Joplin.

Joplin and other black American musicians weren’t deludedly following a snobbish call to cultural quality. They were hoping to make the best of their lives at a self-set distance from the most appalling policing, cultural and literal, using whichever moves and tricks and masks and digressions allowed them to fashion music they could be proud of. They were forced to tread a difficult line between the ‘serious’ and the ‘popular’, between the ‘fake’ and the ‘proper’; what blocked them from their desires and ambitions in any given state or city was the inherited dynamics of a segregated country in which – until recently – they themselves could literally have been bought and sold.

Treemonisha wouldn’t be entirely ignored: it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, but not until 1976. Joplin would be committed to the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane by his wife in 1916, suffering from the delusion that a black man could stage a grand opera. Then came death, and oblivion. He was buried in an unmarked grave, only to be honoured with a stone by ASCAP in the 1970s, after his name and his music had been miraculously revived. It turned out Joplin hadn’t been insane at all.

After the success of The Sting and Joshua Rifkin’s million-selling recordings of Joplin’s rags in the 1970s, Eubie Blake said, ‘Ragtime wasn’t considered anything. Some people, if they don’t understand something they cry it down, they don’t give it a chance. I’ve spent all of my lifetime saying that ragtime was art, see?’

  1. I. The first published syncopated melody was the anonymous ‘Bonja Song’, which had appeared in Britain as far back as 1818, pre-dating even minstrel shows. Though arranged for piano, ‘bonja’ meant banjo.
  2. II. Marching music written for the circus, designed to build up excitement during a show.
  3. III. The first published rag is thought to be ‘La Pas Ma La’ by Ernest Hogan, a white minstrel comedian, in 1895.
  4. IV. It would be convenient for me and the story that’s about to unfold if Scott Joplin had been the first person to use the word ‘rag’ in a song title, but a white Chicago bandleader called William Henry Krell had beaten him to it with ‘Mississippi Rag’ in 1897. Tom Turpin’s ‘Harlem Rag’ – the first by a black musician – came in December of the same year. Like trying to discover the ‘first rock ’n’ roll record’, you can always go deeper: ragtime expert Ann Charters reckoned Charles Gimble’s ‘Old Black Joe’, from as far back as 1877, had the syncopation of ragtime. Eubie Blake could hear it in Franz Liszt; he could hear it in the church – ‘all God’s children got rhythm’. It’s an inexact science.
  5. V. It would also be used to sell Felix cat food in 2007.
  6. VI. When ragtime was revived in the 1950s, enthusiasts were delighted to discover that Lamb was still alive; what’s more, he was more than happy to sit down and talk about Joplin and the heyday of rags, and even cut an album – Joseph Lamb: A Study in Classic Ragtime – for Folkways in 1960. He died in Brooklyn later that same year, aged seventy-two.
  7. VII. If ragtime had an heir, it was stride piano, a style analogous to the rise of jazz that would be perfected in the 1920s by James P. Johnson, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith and Fats Waller. Like ragtime, it was built on the left hand’s rhythmic action, but had a ‘boom-chang’ – alternating a bass note and a chord – rather than the single, softer bass notes of ragtime. Not a huge difference, but enough to make stride pure party music, designed for Harlem. What’s more, unlike purist ragtime pianists, stride players were happy to play the day’s popular songs in the stride style. Johnson’s 1921 ‘Carolina Shout’ became a classic ‘test piece’ for young jazz pianists (Duke Ellington learned it note-for-note from a piano roll), while his 1923 song ‘Charleston’ (from the Broadway show Running Wild) still works as a two-minute precis of the Roaring Twenties. With Waller, stride seeped into swing; on recordings like ‘Truckin’’, ‘Paswonky’ and ‘Yacht Club Swing’, you can feel the disparate American sounds of the early twentieth century coalesce. But, like Joplin, stride’s big names still aspired to the classical tradition. Willie ‘The Lion’’s own compositions often referenced Impressionist painters; Johnson spent the 1930s writing mostly forgotten orchestral pieces; Fats Waller was never happier than when he was playing Bach on an organ, and never really got over his parents’ disapproval of his music. Tellingly, no one used the term ‘stride piano’ in the 1920s; they just called it ‘ragtime’.