Ragtime.

Word still has an excitement about it, doesn't it?

A charm makes you think not just of a kind of music, but maybe of a time too.

When piano players dressed like this, we're seated at pianos like this and making big money in sporting houses and saloons like this one.

The name of this TV series is The Ragtime ERA.

This is the second program devoted specifically to ragtime.

The series itself is about all of America's popular music from 1890 to the Great War.

But it wasn't all ragtime in those days anymore than all of today's music is jazz.

But ragtime was the thing that people got excited about.

It was the thing that was going to change.

Our popular music, more than anything, has changed it before or since.

Ragtime was more than just a new kind of music, it was a national issue.

Listen, June of 1901, the American Federation of Musicians, thats the Musicians Union passed a resolution at its annual convention condemning the playing of ragtime and recommending that its members cease from playing it.

Shortly after that, Thomas Preston Brooke, the leader of the Chicago Marine Band, speaking ragtime is no fad, as many have declared, and it will not die out.

It pleases the God given sense of rhythm, and will endure as long as warm blood flows in human veins, as long as the world shall stand.

1909 Joseph Hoffman, the eminent Polish American concert pianist, was asked by a reader, can the playing of ragtime prevent one from becoming a good musician?

His reply let me phrase your question a little bit differently.

Can one who aspires to become a good musician bear the agony of playing ragtime?

No.

What was all the excitement about?

After all, all they were talking about was a kind of music.

Music that sounded with variations, something like this.

I think you'll agree that there's nothing in that music to cause all this fuss.

Of course it was new and new things are often scorned for a time because they change the status quo.

But that's not enough of an answer.

No, I think the real answer requires a certain frankness, a frankness I think we're capable of here in mid-20th century.

Ragtime was originally the music of the Negro, and to many people at the turn of the century, it was therefore, by definition, crude and unworthy.

Then also there was the place of its origin.

Ragtime was first heard in the sporting districts and the saloons and the honky tonks.

Let's go back to the 90s.

Now, on last week's program, The Mob Decade, about the music of the 90s.

We told you that the music of the Negro was there during the 90s, under the surface, about to sweep the country.

Well, picture those times.

Wide open towns.

The sporting districts open around the clock.

Plenty of work for entertainers of both races.

Now picture the Negro.

Only a few years really away from slavery, a few years away from those simple musical instruments that were available to him as a slave, on which to translate the wonderful, rich cultural heritage of his music.

The clap of hands, the stamp of feet, the the human voice, maybe a couple of bones held in the hand, a tambourine if he was lucky, a banjo.

And then suddenly, in just the space of a few years, piano A piano, the most versatile of all musical instruments, is suddenly his to play.

And not only to play, but to make a good living too.

Now that living was first restricted to the tenderloin district, it's only because at the turn of the century, the Negro entertainer could rarely be booked into the legitimate entertainment houses.

Now Sedalia, Missouri, the late 90s a hustling town in those days with a busy district.

Playing there, a Negro pianist and composer named Scott Joplin.

And we're ready for the real story of ragtime with the publication in 1899 of The Maple Leaf Rag.

That's the Maple Leaf Rag, written by Scott Joplin.

And more than any other composition, it brought ragtime to the attention of America.

Now, Scott Joplin didn't invent ragtime.

It was the music of many, many Negroes, almost the music of the entire people, you might say.

But Joplin's name, I think, should be better known than it is today.

He was typical in many ways of the pianists of the time.

Born in Texarkana, Texas, 1868, Joplin showed his musical talent as a kid, and he had some instruction as a youngster.

He left home when he was in his teens, moved about the country, earning his living at the piano.

When he settled in Sedalia, Missouri, was around 20 years old, and he had a lot more instruction there at a small college and Sedalia for Negroes.

You know, it's a popular misconception that most of the great early Negro musicians were unschooled, not true.

Joplin and most of the other top players were thoroughly trained musicians.

They were just as much at home with a piece of manuscript paper as they were at the piano.

Now, in 1899, the name of John Stark enters the Joplin story, and thus the story of ragtime.

Stark, a white man, owned a music store in Sedalia, and he was also a publisher on a small scale.

He heard ragtime.

He was fascinated by it.

He published The Maple Leaf Rag, and after 1900, John Stark became the nation's leading publisher of Good Ragtime.

He believed in it.

He thought it was a serious new form of music, and John Stark had the courage and the foresight to publish a lot of rags that because because they were pretty tough to play, they didn't sell too well.

They developed around John Stark and Scott Joplin, first in Sedalia, later in Saint Louis, Missouri, and finally in New York City, a small group of pianist composers, men who shared ideas and believed in the future of ragtime.

One of these fellas was named James Scott.

He was some years younger than Scott.

Joplin was helped and influenced by Joplin.

Many rank him second to Joplin in the ranks of ragtime, and he was often called the Chopin of Ragtime.

Here's a rag by James Scott.

It's called Grace & Beauty.

I'm wondering, as you listen to that Grace & Beauty, does that sound like ragtime?

Sound like you think it should sound?

Let me take another one.

Here is the first part of Scott Joplin's Easy Winners.

Sound like ragtime.

Kind of pretty for ragtime, isn't it?

It is ragtime, but it's a far cry from the later commercialized ragtime of Tin Pan Alley that got so bad they called a junk rag.

Well, this kind of brings us around to the question of what is ragtime?

Let me ask you a question.

What is jazz?

Well, now, depending on how old you are and where you live and what your musical tastes are, the word jazz could mean a lot of things.

Maybe to some of you, it means Paul Whiteman playing the music of George Gershwin.

Good.

To others, it might mean the big swing bands of the 30s Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey.

If you are a purist in such matters, the word jazz may mean to you just music by the great masters Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, men like that.

And especially to younger people, the word jazz may mean just our contemporary so-called progressive musicians Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, maybe Stan Kenton.

And it's a possibility that the word jazz to you means all these men and their music.

In which case, I think you'll have to agree that the word jazz doesnt have much meaning at all.

Well, the same thing happened to the word ragtime when ragtime first came along.

It meant, to a lot of people any music that had these new ragged, jagged rhythms to it.

To others, it meant just piano music.

Later was applied to band music, and after the vogue had swept the country, got so anything was called ragtime as long as it wasn't a waltz.

But to these early classic ragtimers is that I'm talking about ragtime meant primarily music for the piano, and in that sense it had certain traits, characteristics that we can analyze and pick apart a bit.

For one thing, early ragtime had a discipline, a musical discipline.

Now, practically all forms of music have some sort of discipline.

That is a framework, a pattern within which the composer has to fit his original ideas.

The framework, the discipline for ragtime was borrowed directly from that of the march.

It meant the rag had to have four separate themes or musical ideas.

Each one was 16 measures long, each one was repeated once, and the first was entered again after the second.

Now here's a rag that shows you those four themes, T he Excelsior Rag.

I am going to omit the repeats.

Incidentally, I have been on most of these rags so we can get more in, but I will repeat the first theme after the second Excelsior Rag.

Excelsior that was written by Joseph Lamb.

Lamb was a white man, one of the few whites that successfully captured the spirit of early Negro ragtime.

He was also a protégé of Scott Joplin and was published by John Stark.

Joseph Lamb a great ragtimer.

When I said that the pattern, the framework of early ragtime was derived from the march.

And, you know, a lot of these rags have a kind of a kind of a march feeling about them, don't they?

Well, that's because the march was one of the ingredients of ragtime, you might say, along with just about every other kind of music, the negroes ran into the old world dances, the schotis',the jigs, the music for the Negroes own native dance, the cakewalk, is a predecessor of ragtime, rhythms of the banjo, plantation songs, work songs, spirituals.

They were all ingredients in the final recipe for piano.

Ragtime and the key ingredient, the shortening, maybe you could say, was syncopation.

Syncopation.

Now there's nothing new about syncopation in music.

It's always been around.

It simply means placing an accent in music where it doesn't naturally want to go.

All music has natural accents.

For instance, in a waltz that's three four time 123123123.

It's on the first beat that gives you, Oom-Pah-Pa Now, of course, ragtime is not played in waltz times.

Its played in the other rhythm called duple time or double time.

Multiples of two, starting with two.

In rag, it's easy, I think, to think of it as 412341234 accents on one and three were they naturally fall.

Well, that's one of the tricks the ragtime was used.

They'd shift that to one and four.

You have that in the first part of the maple leaf in the base 123412341234124.

Now you can take any melody and syncopate it.

Take the old tune.

Swanee River, old folks at home, way down upon the Swanee River.

Now that's unsyncopated.

Now if you want a syncopate, for instance, the first word way that's supposed to hit with one, a strong beat, one way of syncopating it would be to hit one first and then bring in the word way down upon up Swanee River.

Now, in ragtime, you have constant use of these syncopation tricks rather than occasionally.

You have regular misplacing of accents, so you can take a tune like Suwannee River and make a piano rag out of it, constantly shifting the accents of the right hand.

Now, I said that any tune could be syncopated, and that's true, but to call ragtime simply the syncopation of a melody is not correct.

And it would be, well, it would be greatly oversimplified to say that.

In the first place, a good ragtime composer, he didn't make up a tune and then syncopate it.

He conceived this whole thing in syncopation.

That's why it's so hard.

Well, you can't hum a rag, can you?

I mean, it's not written for the voice.

Written for the fingers.

Well, now, another rhythmical device and a close cousin of syncopation is a thing called polyrhythm.

Polyrhythm simply means two or more rhythms working against each other.

In ragtime, it was generally 3 against 4, or I mean 3 against, 2 or 6 against 4.

The old timers called that secondary rag, you find that also in the Maple Leaf Rag in one of the sections.

I'll repeat a little of it to refresh your memory.

Now I'm going to slow that down and exaggerate the accents.

See how they shift?

Well that's the polyrhythm working in there.

You have in the right hand the pattern of three notes working against two heavy beats in the left.

So every time the two runs into the three, it shifts the accent and the threesome.

Now let me play this in waltz time, that is, I'll put the left hand in 3/4 waltz time, the polyrhythm is going to disappear, doesn't have anything to run int and all well have is a pretty little waltz here.

You'll think you're in Vienna.

So ragtime brought us much that was new, at least to popular music.

The shifted accents of constant syncopation, a simple polyrhythm, and a larger form that contained a strict discipline.

Ragtime had one other thing, too, and it's almost impossible to pin it down the style of the guy that was playing it.

And you could take a rag on a piece of sheet music, and it would sound pretty flat until you put it in the hands of a performer.

And he gave it his own subtle treatment.

He well, he improvised on it.

Improvization, starting with ragtime piano and moving up into jazz piano is the basis of the whole thing.

And of all jazz too, for that matter.

And even today, the modern jazz pianist, he may sit down at the piano and play the same tune every night for ten years, but he'll never play at exactly the same way twice.

Not quite.

You know, it's a real shame that these early ragtimers didn't record.

They could have.

Phonograph was in use, especially the cylinder type.

But piano wasn't recorded much early in the century.

The quality was very poor.

And besides that, for piano there was a better way.

The mechanical piano.

Now a mechanical piano, can't capture all the subtleties of phrasing and dynamics that a recording can.

But better than nothing.

And after the turn of the century, the mechanical pianos in their various forms became quite a craze.

Folks sitting at home could pump away on the pedals and listen to rolls that were cut by the great artists.

That's just the way it was done too.

A guy who would sit down and he'd play on a piano device, and that would cut the holes in the master rolls.

And so you're hearing actually the notes that they played.

Fortunately, most of our early ragtimers did make piano rolls.

Let's listen to one of them, one made by Tom Turpin, another great pioneer I haven't mentioned.

Turpin was considered the king of the so-called Saint Louis School of Ragtime.

He was a big man, played heavy, clean, hard rag.

So picture him if you can.

Seated at his piano in the Rosebud Cafe, Saint Louis, Missouri, at the turn of the century, pounding out one of his new rags, the Saint Louis Rag.

Tom Turpin, playing through the invisible fingers of the mechanical piano, Tom Turpin, Scott Joplin, James Scott, Joseph Lamb there were other great ragtimers Louis Chauvin, a legendary pianist.

He wrote his rags in harmonies far beyond his time.

They sound modern today.

Arthur Marshall, oldest Saunders, Sam Patterson those men are all forgotten today.

Joplin was the key man, though, as I said, Joplin didn't invent ragtime, but he was that rare combination of creator and consolidator.

Like W.C.

Handy, he had talent combined with vision.

He believed in his music.

He developed it.

He wrote it down.

He encouraged and helped others to do so.

Scott Joplin I think we'll be hearing his name a lot more in the future.

You know, the story of ragtime is a big part of the story of the Negro people in America today.

We're all proud of the many thousands of fine entertainers in all phases of the entertainment business.

But at the turn of the century, most of those doors were closed to them from the saloons, the honky tonks, the sporting houses.

Ragtime helped to bring the Negro to the positions of leadership and prominence that they hold today in the entertainment world, and very richly deserve.

The story of Ragtime is not all pleasant.

From this happiest of music came considerable tragedy from many of its originators.

Joplin, after his first success, saw the public lose interest in his ideas of classic better ragtime.

He died in 1917.

He was penniless.

But I think that ragtime helped bring the beginnings of a better understanding between the Negro and white people.

We've seen how John Stark, a white man, devoted years of his life to the publication of these early classic ragtimers mostly Negroes.

And the white entertainers and performers learned ragtime from the Negroes as they were to later learn jazz.

And on the other hand, ragtime was first introduced in the legitimate houses, the theaters by white performers, mainly in the late 90s, by a fabulous pianist named Ben Harney, and the first ragtime composition, the first piece of sheet music that had the name rag on it was written by a white composer, a bandmaster from the Middle West named W.H.

Crowe.

It's a good rag.

The first one, from 1897, is called The Mississippi Rag.

Kind of hard to put a date on the end of ragtime.

The word has kind of a quaintness about it today.

I think ragtimes still around just with different labels.

Doesnt really matter much, because by the end of the first decade of this century, ragtime was thoroughly entrenched in our popular music.

The idea had swept the country.

Jazz music was soon to come.

By 1910, Tin Pan Alley, our old friend, had assimilated.

Ragtime was its own New York publishers, missing no bets issued a lot of compositions, first as piano rags and then later in simplified form as rags Songs.

Here's one of them from 1909, a smash hit in that year written by the great smash hit songwriter Harry Von Tilzer and called The Cubanola Glide.

Way down in Cuba, where skies are clear and it is summer time, all through the year.

Dey have de love en est dance I know.

Come along honey babe and I'll show you.

Get a way closer, baby.

Squeeze me tight.

Rag a dag to left, den to da right.

Shake it up, shake it up.

Side by side.

Cuddle right up to me as we glide.

Aint it en trance in, we dancing dat Cubanola Glide Keep on glidin, slide, slide keep on a slidin honey, look into your baby's eyes.

Throw your arms around me.

Aint you glad you found me.

Tease, squeeze, lovin & woooin Oooh babe, what are you doing?

Ride the glory by your baby's side.

When we do the Cubanola Glide.

Next week, we're going to take you back again.

Back before the turn of the century.

And bring up through the ragtime era, the other side of the music of the Negro.

Ragtime brought us new rhythms.

A happy elative music.

To blend with it, to enter like ragtime into our popular music, to combine, you might say, with ragtime to become what was known as jazz, the blues.

So next week, winding through those happy years of the ragtime era, the lonesome road of the blues.

This is National Educational Television.