Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time,[2] is a musical style that had its peak from the 1890s to 1910s.[1] Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm.[1] Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb. Ragtime pieces (often called "rags") are typically composed for and performed on piano, though the genre has been adapted for a variety of instruments and styles.
Ragtime music originated within African-American communities in the late 19th century and became a distinctly American form of popular music. It is closely related to marches. Ragtime pieces usually contain several distinct themes, often arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises. Scott Joplin, known as the "King of Ragtime", gained fame through compositions like "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer". Ragtime influenced early jazz,[3] Harlem stride piano, Piedmont blues, and European classical composers such as Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky. Despite being overshadowed by jazz in the 1920s, ragtime has experienced several revivals, notably in the 1950s and 1970s (the latter renaissance due in large part to the use of "The Entertainer" in the film The Sting). The music was distributed primarily through sheet music and piano rolls, with some compositions adapted for other instruments and ensembles.
Ragtime music was developed long before it was printed as sheet music. It had its origins in African American communities of St. Louis, Missouri. Most of the early ragtime pianists could not read or notate music, but instead played by ear and improvised. The instrument of choice by ragtime musicians was usually a banjo or a piano. It was performed in brothels, bars, saloons, and informal gatherings at house parties or juke joints .
The first ragtime composition to be published was "La Pas Ma La" in 1895. It was written by minstrel comedian Ernest Hogan. Kentucky native Ben Harney composed the song "You've Been a Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down" the following year in 1896. The composition was a hit and helped popularize the genre to the mainstream.[4][5] Another early ragtime pioneer was comedian and songwriter Irving Jones.[6] [7]
Ragtime was also a modification of the march style popularized by John Philip Sousa. Jazz critic Rudi Blesh thought its polyrhythm may be coming from African music, although no historian or musicologist has made any connection with any music from Africa.[8] Ragtime composer Scott Joplin (ca. 1868–1917) from Texas, became famous through the publication of the "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) and a string of ragtime hits such as "The Entertainer" (1902), although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s.[9][10] For at least 12 years after its publication, "Maple Leaf Rag" heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, chord progressions or metric patterns.[11]
In a 1913 interview published in the black newspaper New York Age, Scott Joplin asserted that there had been "ragtime music in America ever since the Negro race has been here, but the white people took no notice of it until about twenty years ago [in the 1890s]."[12]
Ragtime quickly established itself as a distinctly American form of popular music. Ragtime became the first African-American music to have an impact on mainstream popular culture. Piano "professors" such as Jelly Roll Morton played ragtime in the "sporting houses" (bordellos) of New Orleans. Polite society embraced ragtime as disseminated by brass bands and "society" dance bands. Bands led by W. C. Handy and James R. Europe were among the first to crash the color bar in American music. The new rhythms of ragtime changed the world of dance bands and led to new dance steps, popularized by the show-dancers Vernon and Irene Castle during the 1910s. The growth of dance orchestras in popular entertainment was an outgrowth of ragtime and continued into the 1920s.
Ragtime also made its way to Europe. Shipboard orchestras on transatlantic lines included ragtime music in their repertoire. In 1912 the first public concerts of ragtime were performed in the United Kingdom by the American Ragtime Octette (ARO) at the Hippodrome, London; a group organized by ragtime composer and pianist Lewis F. Muir who toured Europe.[13][14] Immensely popular with British audiences, the ARO popularized several of Muir's rags (such as "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee" and "Hitchy-Koo") which were credited by historian Ian Whitcomb as the first American popular songs to influence British culture and music.[15] The ARO recorded some of Muir's rags with the British record label The Winner Records in 1912; the first ragtime recordings made in Europe.[16] James R. Europe's 369th Regiment band generated great enthusiasm during its 1918 tour of France.[17]
Ragtime was an influence on early jazz; the influence of Jelly Roll Morton continued in the Harlem stride piano style of players such as James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. Ragtime was also a major influence on Piedmont blues. Dance orchestras started evolving away from ragtime towards the big band sounds that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s when they adopted smoother rhythmic styles.
There have been numerous revivals since newer styles supplanted ragtime in the 1920s. First in the early 1940s, many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 rpm records. A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s as a wider variety of ragtime genres of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed, published, and recorded.
In the 1960s, two major factors brought about a greater public recognition of ragtime. The first was the publication of the book, They All Played Ragtime, in 1960, by Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh. Some historians refer to this book as "The Ragtime Bible." Regardless, it was the first comprehensive and serious attempt to document the first ragtime era, and its three most important composers, Joplin, Scott, and Lamb. The second major factor was the rise to prominence of Max Morath. Morath created two television series for National Educational Television (now PBS) in 1960 and 1962: The Ragtime Era, and The Turn of the Century. Morath turned the latter into a one-man-show in 1969, and toured the U.S. with it for five years. Morath subsequently created different one-man-shows which also toured the U.S., that also educated and entertained audiences about ragtime.[18] New ragtime composers soon followed, including Morath, Donald Ashwander, Trebor Jay Tichenor, John Arpin, William Bolcom, William Albright.
In 1971, Joshua Rifkin released a compilation of Joplin's work which was nominated for a Grammy Award.[19]
In 1973, The New England Ragtime Ensemble (then a student group called The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble) recorded The Red Back Book, a compilation of some of Joplin's rags in period orchestrations edited by conservatory president Gunther Schuller. It won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance of the year and was named Top Classical Album of 1974 by Billboard magazine. The film The Sting (1973) brought ragtime to a wide audience with its soundtrack of Joplin tunes. The film's rendering of "The Entertainer", adapted and orchestrated by Marvin Hamlisch, was a Top 5 hit in 1975.
Ragtime – with Joplin's work at the forefront – has been cited as an American equivalent of the minuets of Mozart, the mazurkas of Chopin, or the waltzes of Brahms.[20] Ragtime also influenced classical composers including Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky.[21][22]
Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century and descended from the jigs and march music played by African American bands, referred to as "jig piano" or "piano thumping".[23][24]
By the start of the 20th century, it became widely popular throughout North America and was listened and danced to, performed, and written by people of many different subcultures. A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music, especially the marches made popular by John Philip Sousa.
Some early piano rags were classified as "jig", "rag", and "coon songs". These labels were sometimes used interchangeably in the mid-1890s, 1900s, and 1910s.[23] Ragtime was also preceded by its close relative the cakewalk. In 1895, black entertainer Ernest Hogan released the earliest ragtime composition, called "La Pas Ma La". The following year he released another composition called "All Coons Look Alike to Me", which eventually sold a million copies.[25]
Tom Fletcher, a vaudeville entertainer and the author of 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business, has stated that "Hogan was the first to put on paper the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians."[26] While the success of "All Coons Look Alike to Me" helped popularize the country to ragtime rhythms, its use of racial slurs created a number of derogatory imitation tunes, known as "coon songs" because of their use of racist and stereotypical images of black people. In Hogan's later years, he admitted shame and a sense of "race betrayal" from the song, while also expressing pride in helping bring ragtime to a larger audience.[27]
The emergence of mature ragtime is usually dated to 1897, the year in which several important early rags were published. "Harlem Rag" by Tom Turpin and "Mississippi Rag" by William Krell were both release that year. In 1899, Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" was published and became a great hit and demonstrated more depth and sophistication than earlier ragtime.
Ragtime was one of the main influences on the early development of jazz (along with the blues). Some artists, such as Jelly Roll Morton, were present and performed both ragtime and jazz styles during the period the two styles overlapped. He also incorporated the Spanish tinge in his performances, which gave a habanera or tango rhythm to his music.[28] Jazz largely surpassed ragtime in mainstream popularity in the early 1920s, although ragtime compositions continue to be written up to the present, and periodic revivals of popular interest in ragtime occurred in the 1950s and the 1970s.
The heyday of ragtime occurred before sound recording was widely available. Like European classical music, classical ragtime has primarily been a written tradition distributed though sheet music. But sheet music sales ultimately depended on the skill of amateur pianists, which limited classical ragtime's complexity and proliferation. A folk ragtime tradition also existed before and during the period of classical ragtime (a designation largely created by Scott Joplin's publisher John Stillwell Stark), manifesting itself mostly through string bands, banjo and mandolin clubs (which experienced a burst of popularity during the early 20th century) and the like.
Ragtime was also distributed via piano rolls for mechanical player pianos. While the traditional rag was fading in popularity, a genre called novelty piano (or novelty ragtime) emerged that took advantage of new advances in piano roll technology and the phonograph record to permit a more complex, pyrotechnic, performance-oriented style of rag to be heard. Chief among the novelty rag composers is Zez Confrey, whose "Kitten on the Keys" popularized the style in 1921.
Ragtime also served as the roots for stride piano, a more improvisational piano style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Elements of ragtime found their way into much of the American popular music of the early 20th century. It also played a central role in the development of the musical style later referred to as Piedmont blues; indeed, much of the music played by such artists of the style as Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller, Elizabeth Cotten, and Etta Baker could be referred to as "ragtime guitar."[29]
Although most ragtime was composed for piano, transcriptions for other instruments and ensembles are common, notably including Gunther Schuller's arrangements of Joplin's rags. Ragtime guitar continued to be popular into the 1930s, usually in the form of songs accompanied by skilled guitar work. Numerous records emanated from several labels, performed by Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others. Occasionally ragtime was scored for ensembles (particularly dance bands and brass bands) similar to those of James Reese Europe or as songs like those written by Irving Berlin. Joplin had long-standing ambitions of synthesizing the worlds of ragtime and opera, to which end the opera Treemonisha was written. However, its first performance, poorly staged with Joplin accompanying on the piano, was "disastrous" and was never performed again in Joplin's lifetime.[30] The score was lost for decades, then rediscovered in 1970, and a fully orchestrated and staged performance took place in 1972.[31] An earlier opera by Joplin, A Guest of Honor, has been lost.[32]
The rag was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music.[8] It was usually written in 2
4 or 4
4 time with a predominant left-hand pattern of bass notes on strong beats (beats 1 and 3) and chords on weak beats (beat 2 and 4) accompanying a syncopated melody in the right hand. According to some sources the name "ragtime" may come from the "ragged or syncopated rhythm" of the right hand.[1] A rag written in 3
4 time is a "ragtime waltz".
Ragtime is not a meter in the same way that marches are in duple meter and waltzes are in triple meter; it is rather a musical style that uses an effect that can be applied to any meter. The defining characteristic of ragtime music is a specific type of syncopation in which melodic accents occur between metrical beats. This results in a melody that seems to be avoiding some metrical beats of the accompaniment by emphasizing notes that either anticipate or follow the beat ("a rhythmic base of metric affirmation, and a melody of metric denial"[33]). The ultimate (and intended) effect on the listener is actually to accentuate the beat, thereby inducing the listener to move to the music. Scott Joplin, the composer/pianist known as the "King of Ragtime", called the effect "weird and intoxicating." He also used the term "swing" in describing how to play ragtime music: "Play slowly until you catch the swing...".[34]
The name swing later came to be applied to an early style of jazz that developed from ragtime. Converting a non-ragtime piece of music into ragtime by changing the time values of melody notes is known as "ragging" the piece. Original ragtime pieces usually contain several distinct themes, four being the most common number. These themes were typically 16 bars, each theme divided into periods of four four-bar phrases and arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises. Typical patterns were AABBACCC′, AABBCCDD and AABBCCA, with the first two strains in the tonic key and the following strains in the subdominant. Sometimes rags would include introductions of four bars or bridges, between themes, of anywhere between four and 24 bars.[1]
In a note on the sheet music for the song "Leola" Joplin wrote, "Notice! Don't play this piece fast. It is never right to play 'ragtime' fast."[35] E. L. Doctorow used the quotation as the epigraph to his novel Ragtime.
