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Ragtime

A Musical and Cultural History

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The Scope of Ragtime

Ragtime as Popular Song

The earliest kind of popular song identified as ragtime is the "coon song," a Negro dialect song frequently, but not always, of an offensively denigrating nature. Although the coon song had a long prior existence in the American minstrel and vaudeville traditions, in the 1890s it acquired the additional label of "ragtime."

"Rag time" is a term applied to the peculiar, broken rhythmic features of the popular "coon song."

A hopper is fitted onto the press and into it are poured jerky note groups by the million, "coon poetry" by the ream, colored inks by the ton, and out of the other end of the press comes a flood of "rag-time" abominations, that sweeps over the country.

The coon songs which are cited most often (indicating a degree of popularity and currency) are Ernest Hogan's All Coons Look Alike to Me (1896), Joseph Howard and Ida Emerson's Hello! Ma Baby (1899), and Theodore Metz's A Hot Time in the Old Town (1896).

By 1906 the popularity of the more flagrantly abusive form of coon song had faded, but popular vocal music retained the ragtime label. Some song hits, such as Lewis Muir's Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (1912), still presented Southern imagery, but even songs totally devoid of regional or racial implications, such as Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911) and Everybody's Doin' It (1911), fell within the scope of ragtime. This deracialization of ragtime songs was, in fact, viewed by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), a prominent writer on black culture, as a theft from the black man:

The first of the so-called Ragtime songs to be published were actually Negro secular folk songs that were set down by white men, who affixed their own names as composers. In fact, before the Negro succeeded fully in establishing his title as creator of his secular music the form was taken away from him and made national instead of racial. It has been developed into the distinct musical idiom by which America expresses itself popularly, and by which it is known universally. For a long while the vocal form was almost absolutely divorced from the Negro; the separation being brought about largely through the elimination of dialect from the texts of the songs.

A controversial article appearing in the London Times includes a rhythmic analysis of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee and cites as other examples of ragtime Oh, You Beautiful Doll, Going Back to Dixie, and How Are You Miss Rag-Time? Although the article was widely quoted and discussed, both in praise and criticism, there was no disagreement on the choice of music cited as ragtime. Similarly, in a pair of articles by Hiram K. Moderwell, a prominent music critic, ragtime is portrayed almost exclusively in its vocal forms:

I remember hearing a negro quartet singing "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee," in a café, and I felt my blood thumping in time, my muscles twitching to the rhythm....

I think of the rollicking fun of "The International Rag," the playful delicacy of "Everybody's Doing It," the bristling laziness of "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee," the sensual poignancy of "La Seduction" tango, and the tender pathos of "The Memphis Blues."

In proposing that ragtime be taken out of the cafés and put into the concert halls, he writes:

I firmly believe that a ragtime programme, well organized and well sung, would be delightful and stimulating to the best audience the community could muster.

The novelist, critic, and essayist Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), while disputing the advisability of some of Moderwell's proposals, nevertheless agrees that ragtime is vocal music. And composer-educator Daniel Gregory Mason (1873–1953), who vehemently opposes most of Moderwell's views on this subject, has no qualms about accepting such songs as Everybody's Doin' It and Memphis Blues (1912) as ragtime:

Suppose ... we examine in some detail a typical example of ragtime such as "The Memphis Blues" ...

As songs were the most conspicuous species of ragtime, it follows that songwriters were the most conspicuous composers. This assumption is confirmed by the literature of the time, for those named as ragtime composers were almost invariably songwriters (some exceptions will be discussed in Chapters Four and Nine). Some of the most frequently mentioned were Irving Berlin (b. 1888), George M. Cohan (1878–1942), Louis Hirsch (1887–1924), Lewis F. Muir (1884–1950), and Jean Schwartz (1878–1956). Irving Berlin, who did not attain prominence with his ragtime songs until 1911, even claimed a part in the genesis of ragtime:

I believe that such songs of mine as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "That Mysterious Rag," "Ragtime Violin," "I Want To Be in Dixie," and "Take a Little Tip from Father" virtually started the ragime mania in America.

It has been suggested in recent years that the popular understanding of ragtime today is not what it was when the music was being created, but the thesis has not met with general acceptance. In a letter to the Ragtime Society newsletter in 1965, one who was apparently present during the early days of ragtime expressed his perplexity over the present trend of emphasizing a particular kind of piano ragtime and ignoring vocal ragtime:

... we who were around when "Boom de Ay" was discovered in Babe Connor's place in St. Louis as the nineties started up, and when the "Hot Time" tune took words and entered the ragtime- song race ... await enlightenment as to just what it is about a specimen of syncopation that makes it "classic ragtime," while countless of the world's favorite old ragtime numbers apparently go rejected by the modernists.

Perhaps the vocal ragtime mentioned above is not on the same musical level as the best in piano ragtime. Quite possibly only a few ragtime enthusiasts today would be interested in these songs. But ignoring the fact that this music was considered ragtime conceals the historical truth and inevitably leads to serious misinterpretations. Whereas the restricted interpretation of ragtime suffices for the needs of today's entertainment, for a true historical and critical view of the subject a broader perspective must prevail.

The Ragtime Band

The predominance of vocal music in early writings on ragtime is revealed not only in the relatively high proportion of articles devoted exclusively to songs, but also in the frequent linking of vocal with instrumental ragtime. Although ragtime songs seem to have made their initial impact upon the musical stage, they were played as well by dance, march, and concert bands:

Probably the majority of our readers are aware that the most popular music of the day is that known as "rag-time." ... From New York to California and from the great lakes to the gulf ragtime music of all styles is the rage. Look at the ballroom programmes for the past season and we find rag-time and other "coon" melodies introduced into every dance where it is practicable.

[John Philip Sousa] was as usual liberal with his encores consisting of his own marches and ragtime ballads.

[In New Orleans, around 1905] many of the tunes played by the small marching bands were popular ragtime songs, not classic rags such as those composed by Joplin.

Even when they were not direct adaptations of existing songs, instrumental rags were frequently thought of as derivatives of the vocal medium:

The craze for "coon" songs, as they are familiarly known, began about three years ago, and shows little sign of abatement at the present time. Not content with "rag-time" songs, marches, two-steps, and even waltzes have been subjected to this syncopated style of treatment, in order to appease the seemingly insatiable thirst for that peculiar rhythmic effect produced by successive irregular accent.

The song-to-instrument route was not one-sided; the process was also reversed as original instrumental rags such as Kerry Mills's dance hit At a Georgia Campmeeting (1897) were reissued in alternate versions with words. In addition, many early instrumental rag publications include a vocal chorus. Because of such developments, original instrumental pieces and adaptations from songs frequently merged into one body of ragtime literature.

An important phase of ragtime ensemble performance — important because it reflects on the origins of both ragtime and jazz — is the improvised syncopation, or "ragging," of existing pieces. By its very nature the music is not notated, and no contemporaneous recordings have been discovered, but the style is known today through later re-creations made by musicians from the period, such as those recorded by ragtime-jazz musician Bunk Johnson (1879–1949) in the mid-1940s, and through descriptions. Johnson has related how hymns were transformed by turn-of-the-century New Orleans funeral bands, and Jelly Roll Morton (1855–1941) has similarly depicted the ragging of Sousa marches, a popular practice described also by black poet-song lyricist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906):

But hit's Sousa played in ragtime, an' hit's Rastus on Parade,

W'en de colo'd ban' comes ma'chin' down de street.

Although much ensemble ragtime was published and copyrighted in piano editions, it is evident that in at least some cases the composers intended the music for band performance. On the cover of William Krell's Mississippi Rag (1897), the earliest identified piano score using the term "rag" in its title, is a banner proclaiming: "The First Rag-Time Two Step Ever Written, and First Played by Krell's Orchestra, Chicago." In another case, an unusual bass line in Arthur Pryor's A Coon Band Contest (1899) is identified as "trombone solo" (Example I–1).

The prominence of bands in early nonvocal ragtime recordings also testifies to the importance of this medium, as do the advertisements for band arrangements in some popularly oriented music magazines. One such periodical that devoted considerable space to band advertisements was Metronome. During 1897 Metronome printed numerous announcements of cakewalk marches, two-steps, schottisches, polkas, waltzes, and band arrangements of coon songs. The first advertisement in this magazine to specify "ragtime" appeared in the January 1898 issue, and by the following year such notices were commonplace. Ragtime advertisements continued to appear in substantial quantities until early 1916, when the demand for this music in the ballroom was reduced. (The other dances being advertised in 1916 were one-steps, tangos, fox and turkey trots, waltzes, and maxixes.) In the November 1916 issue the category of ragtime was eliminated. Although the word "rag" continued to appear occasionally in titles, such pieces were not necessarily considered rags; Eubie Blake's Bugle Call Rag (1916), for instance, was labeled a fox trot.

Ragtime for Other Instrumental Combinations

The media for ragtime were not restricted to piano, song, and band. The instrumental diversity included some combinations which seem exotic today. The cover of the piano publication of Theodore Morse's Coontown Capers (1897), for instance, lists the availability of fifteen different arrangements, including orchestra; brass band; violin and piano; banjo; zither; and two mandolins, guitar, and piano. Similarly, the cover of Abe Holzmann's Bunch o' Blackberries (1899) advertises: "Published also for all instruments including Mandolin, Guitar, Banjo, Orchestra, Band, Etc."

Recordings of the period reveal this same diversity. While the listings in Jasen's Recorded Ragtime do not specify the medium, some clues to the instruments of frequently recorded artists are given on pages 7–10 of the introduction, and additional identification is occasionally supplied by the name of the performing group, such as "Murray's Ragtime Banjo Quartet." Thus it is possible to detect some of the instrumental variety that was represented on recordings: two accordion performances (1914, 1915) of Hungarian Rag, a marimba-band version (1916) of Dill Pickles, three piccolo solos (1900–1902) on Rag Time Skedaddle, a xylophone recording (1912) of Red Pepper. Similarly, among the 8,000 listings in Koenigsberg's Edison Cylinder Records, are many of rags played on "exotic" instrumental combinations.

The relative position of piano ragtime is considered more thoroughly in Chapter Four. For the present it is sufficient to observe that with such an abundance and variety of instrumental and vocal versions of ragtime, the piano genre did not have the prominence it enjoys today.

Syncopation

At the core of the contemporary understanding of ragtime, regardless of medium, was syncopation. The question "What is ragtime?" was asked throughout the period, and almost invariably explanations included a statement about syncopation:

So rag-time music is, simply, syncopated rhythm maddened into a desperate iterativeness; a rhythm overdone, to please the present public music taste.

Rag-time is merely a common form of syncopation in which the rhythm is distorted in order to produce a more or less ragged, hysterical effect.

RAG TIME. A modern term, of American origin, signifying, in the first instance, broken rhythm in melody, especially a sort of continuous syncopation.

"Rag-Time," then may be said to be a strongly syncopated melody superimposed on a strictly regular accompaniment, and it is the combination of these two rhythms that gives "rag-time" its character.

Ragtime music is chiefly a matter of rhythm and not much a matter of melody or fine harmony. It is based almost exclusively upon syncopated time.

Not satisfied simply with designating syncopation as the defining feature of ragtime, Hiram Moderwell, who as a frequent contributor of music articles to New Republic and other periodicals should have known better, attributes an exaggerated significance to the rhythms of ragtime:

It [ragtime] has carried the complexities of the rhythmic subdivision of the measure to a point never before reached in the history of music.

Irving Berlin reverses the relationship between ragtime and syncopation as he says, not that ragtime is a form of syncopation, but that "Syncopation is nothing but another name for ragtime." From this false premise, he compounds his error by concluding that "the old masters" also wrote ragtime, but "in a stiff and stilted way."

The implication, evident in many of these articles, that the term "ragtime" refers directly to the ragged rhythmic quality of syncopation is occasionally spelled out explicitly. An editorial referring to compositions "written in what is contemptuously called 'rag time'" clearly designates ragtime as a rhythmic process as well as a genre. The word is also used as a synonym for syncopation: "in American slang to 'rag' a melody is to syncopate a normally regular tune." "Strictly speaking, to rag a tune means to destroy its rhythm and tempo and substitute for the 2–4 or 4–4 time a syncopated rhythm." An article on ragtime performance specifies that the pianist must have the ability "to syncopate (rag) the tones."

The term "rag" is thus seen to be a noun, identifying a type of music; a verb, referring to the process of syncopation; and an adjective, modifying "time," that is, "ragged time." Etymologically, the hyphenated form used in the earlier articles (rag-time) and the rarer two-word form (rag time) also suggest adjectival origins.

The assumption of ragtime's being characterized primarily by a syncopated rhythm was so widespread that few writers questioned this connection. One who did was music critic and biographer Francis Toye (1883–1964). Noting the absence of syncopation in some pieces identified as ragtime, he commented:

I do not think that rag-time can be defined as rhythm at all. True it has a characteristic rhythm and usually a syncopated one. But not invariably. The popular "Hitchy-Koo" and "Dixie," for instance, are hardly syncopated, yet it were pure pedantry not to class them as rag-time.

Another writer, giving similar reasons, tried to separate the concept of ragtime from syncopation:

Perhaps the best way to define ragtime and prove that it and syncopation are not necessarily analogous will be to go to the bottom of things and summon up some actual illustration....

"For Me and My Gal" is typically ragtime, yet it is practically free of syncopation — to be exact, there are just three measures of syncopated melody. ... The most striking example of ragtime music came out a few years ago in Irving Berlin's song "Alexander's Ragtime Band." ...

What made this song so popular? It was not syncopation, for there is no syncopation at all in the chorus, which is the most pleasing part of the song.

These articles, however, are exceptions, and reflect the general tendency by 1911 to include in the ragtime category almost any rhythmical, popular music. At least one commentator protested against this extension of the term "ragtime," suggesting that its application be restricted to syncopated music:

"Ragtime" ... has become a most comprehensive word in recent years, and at least with a certain class of musicians who should know better, it means pretty nearly anything not under the head of serious or classical music.

If the rhythmic element predominates or is at all prominent it is "ragtime," no matter whether a single instance of syncopation occurs in the music or not....

The writer, for one, is in favor of restricting the word ragtime to its original definition, as meaning that time or rhythm in which the dominating characteristic feature is syncopation.

This protest reveals a recognition, by 1913, of the process that was already divesting ragtime of its most definitive feature. Of this process, more will be said later.

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Excerpted from Ragtime by Edward Berlin. Copyright © 2002 Edward A. Berlin. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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