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Jean Reynolds

Professor Frank Burton

ENG 1102

3 August 2015

The Ragtime Revolution

In 1976 a Pulitzer Prize was posthumously awarded to an African-

American composer who had died in poverty in 1917 at the age of forty-

eight. That man was Scott Joplin, and the music he championed was called

ragtime. At the time of his death, ragtime was losing popularity, and for the

next forty years only a small number of enthusiasts kept performing his

music. But by the 1970s, Americans were rediscovering the “ragged

rhythms and lilting melodies” (Curtis 1) of ragtime, and an amazing revival

began. Music publishers sold huge numbers of ragtime recordings and

sheet music, and scholars began to take a closer look at ragtime and its role

in American music. Historians today point to the ragtime era (1895-1915) as

a turning point in American musical history. According to music scholars

William Schafer and Johannes Riedel, “Ragtime effected a total musical

revolution, the first great impact of black folk culture on the dominant white

middle-class culture of America” (xi).

Thanks to ragtime’s fusion of black rhythms and traditional European

musical forms, it became “the first distinctively American musical style”

(Smithsonian 227). The United States was still a young country, and both its

popular songs and serious musical compositions were based on European

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hymns, folk songs, and marches. But ragtime, with its complex African

rhythms and syncopated melodies, helped Americans make a dramatic

break from the music of the past. The “Maple Leaf Rag,” for example,

employs an African-American hexaotonic scale that would later be called

“the blues scale” and become a common feature of black music (Stewart

97).

Scott Joplin’s musical compositions prompted Americans to start

altering their assumptions about African-Americans. “One of ragtime’s

major contributions was to emphasize the black musician’s ability to

conceive and score a formalized instrumental music, quite an abstract form”

(Schafer 35). Although Joplin (1868-1917) is most remembered for his

bestselling piano compositions (called “rags”), he was a versatile and

accomplished musician who experimented with other musical forms. A

Joplin suite called The Ragtime Dance is still performed today, and Joplin

also composed two operas. Just before Joplin died, he announced that he

was working on a symphony (Berlin 238).

As the ragtime craze spread across the United States, ragtime became

embedded in American culture. Schafer and Riedel say that ragtime

“inspired a new direction in the American musical theater” (xi), and they

find a direct link between ragtime and “later developments in black music—

specifically jazz” (xii). Ragtime was heard everywhere: Alice Roosevelt,

daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, once interrupted a diplomatic

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reception at the White House to ask the Marine Band to play Joplin’s

“Maple Leaf Rag” (White 216).

Although ragtime traces its origins to African-American rhythms, it

brought black and white musicians together right from the beginning. The

first rag ever published was the “Mississippi Rag” composed by a white

musician, William Krell, in 1897. Scott Joplin got his start when white

businessman John Stark published Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Although few

black composers were paid royalties for their work in those days, Stark

agreed to pay Joplin for each copy sold. According to Edward Berlin, this

contract “gave him sufficient income to change the conditions and course of

his life” (56). Sales from this one piece of music enabled Joplin to “meet

most of his basic expenses” for life (58). John Stark also benefited from the

arrangement. Finding himself “the surprised owner of the hottest copyright

in ragtime” (Jasen 17), Stark expanded his publishing business and moved

from the small town of Sedalia, Missouri to St. Louis and then to New York

City.

White women were hugely important in the development of ragtime.

Five-and-dime stores promoted sales by hiring pianists to perform the latest

music in their stores. Often the music was ragtime and the performer was a

woman. Superstar Judy Garland was one of those pianists, and her

daughter Liza Minnelli portrayed one of those pianists in the film In the

Good Old Summertime (Luft 8). Even more important were the female

composers of ragtime. Max Morath, a white performer who did much to

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keep ragtime alive in the twentieth century, explained, “Ragtime was

’black,’ the ragtime women were white” (155). Irene Giblin was a talented

pianist who played ragtime in a department store in St. Louis and went on

to compose rags herself. A research study by Max Morath and John Edward

Hasse found that by 1930 at least 220 women had published at least one

rag or ragtime song (White 316).

The most famous black-white collaboration brought together Joseph

Lamb, a young white man who composed ragtime, and Scott Joplin. When

Joplin heard Lamb’s “Sensation Rag,” he persuaded John Stark to publish it

and encouraged Lamb to continue composing. According to Carol

Binkowski, Lamb’s biographer, “This was the beginning of a very cordial

friendship between Joe Lamb and Scott Joplin” (81). Lamb eventually

published twelve rags with James Stark, and he began composing again

during the ragtime revival that began in the 1950s.

Ragtime’s most important achievement was to turn America from a

musical follower into a world leader. The tables began to turn in 1892, when

Czech composer Antonin Dvorak moved to the United States. An avid

folklorist, he urged American composers to incorporate black musical ideas

into their compositions (Berlin 87). Soon a number of European musicians

began to find inspiration in the infectious rhythms of ragtime. Musical

innovators found in ragtime “an opportunity to explore a provocative

approach to matters of meter and rhythm quite foreign to their own cultural

experience” (Bomberger 84).

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The popularity of ragtime grew rapidly both in America and overseas.

John Philip Sousa first introduced European audiences to ragtime at the

Paris Exposition in 1900, where Sousa’s band won a prize for its rendition of

“My Ragtime Baby” by Fred Stone (Southern 319). Soon musicians overseas

began to recognize that ragtime was “a music of enduring worth,

revolutionary in concept and development” (Blesh 5).

As ragtime traveled across Europe, serious musicians began to

incorporate its rhythms into many of their compositions. “The quality of

ragtime is, of course, what attracted not only musicians like Debussy,

Stravinsky, Satie, Ives, and Sousa, but also millions of people here and

abroad” (Schuller 80). Schafer and Riedel also name Darius Milhaud, Paul

Hindemith, and Maurice Ravel as composers inspired by ragtime (xi).

More than 115 years have passed since Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”

captured the hearts of music lovers in America and around the world. Since

that time, racial barriers have continued to fall, and American jazz, pop

music, and musical theater have won worldwide renown. Although for a

time America seemed to forget about the role that ragtime played in its

history, that mistake has been corrected. Ragtime scholarship continues to

flourish, with new articles and books appearing all the time. H. Loring

White notes that there are at least six ragtime festivals every year, and

ragtime is also featured at many jazz festivals (2). New recordings appear

every year, and composers have begun to compose rags again. Joplin’s

opera Treemonisha has been performed in the United States, Italy, Finland,

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and Germany. According to Schaefer and Riedel, ragtime “will endure as

long as people have the sensibilities to understand its beauty and its

strength” (159).

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Works Cited

Berlin, Edward A. King of Ragtime. New York: Oxford U Press, 1994.

Binkowski, Carol J. Joseph F. Lamb: A Passion for Ragtime. Jefferson:

McFarland, 2012.

Blesh, Rudi and Harriet Janis. They All Played Ragtime. New York: Knopf,

1950.

Bomberger, E Douglas. “European Perceptions of Ragtime.” 83-97. Jazz and

the Germans. Ed. Michael J. Budds. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2002.

Curtis, Susan. Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune. Columbia: Missouri U Press,

1994.

Luft, Lorna. Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir. New York: Gallery,

1999.

Morath, Max. “”May Aufderheide and the Ragtime Women.” 154-165.

Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music. Ed. John Edward Hasse.

New York: Schirmer, 1985.

Jasen, David A. and Gene Jones. Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of

Ragtime and Early Jazz. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Schafer, William J. and Johannes Riedel. Art of Ragtime. Baton Rouge:

Louisiana U Press, 1973.

Schuller, Gunther. “Rags, the Classics, and Jazz.” Ragtime: Its History,

Composers, and Music. Ed. John Edward Hasse. New York: Schirmer,

1985. 79-89.

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Smithsonian Music: The Definitive Visual History. DK Publishing, 2013.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York:

Norton, 1997.

Stewart, Earl and Jane Duran. “Scott Joplin and the Quest for Identity.”

Journal of Aesthetic Education 41.2. (2007) : 94-99.

White, H. Loring. Ragging It. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2005.

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