Ragtime

By: Eric Bennett

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Ragtime

African American musical genre of the late nineteenth century that strongly influenced an emerging American popular music and provided a major impetus in the development of jazz.

Although the term ragtime has come to connote a particular form of piano music associated with composer Scott Joplin, it originally applied to a larger body of instrumental music and song. Ragtime emerged in the 1890s and thrived for two decades, as millions of middle-class whites bought sheet music, pianos, and piano rolls. Through its immense commercial success, ragtime gave birth to the American music industry; through its rhythmic and melodic innovations, it signaled the end of America's dependency on Western European music. Ragtime ushered in a new style of concert music that built upon Afro-diasporic musical traditions.

Because ragtime emerged from African American folk music, its precise origins remain undocumented and obscure. Yet the roots of ragtime undoubtedly lie in the music of itinerant black pianists who played in bordellos and saloons. Ironically, ragtime owes its quick acceptance in part to the tradition of Minstrelsy, which portrayed African Americans as exotic, lazy, and funny. Primed by these stereotypes as well as bastardized versions of black songs, middle-class audiences readily accepted real African American music.

The origin of the name ragtime also remains obscure. Some historians suspect it derives from the so-called ragged, or syncopated, playing style that characterized black music in the late nineteenth century. Others cite the use of rag as a name for a short African American folk tune. Evidence such as an early piece by Joplin, “Original Rags,” suggests that ragtime piano originally anthologized folk melodies. Bordello pianists probably collected and blended familiar strains. Nevertheless, the word rag soon came to designate the larger structure instead of the fragments of which it was composed.

Joplin, along with black composer James Scott and white composer Joseph Lamb, established the conventions of ragtime piano and influenced a generation of black composers. These composers included Arthur Marshall, Louis Chauvin, and Artie Matthews, all of whom, like Joplin and Scott, came from Missouri. Joplin, Scott, and Lamb also influenced white composers such as Paul Pratt and J. Russell Robinson.

Classic ragtime followed a number of formal conventions. First, it combined marchlike bass notes with a heavily syncopated melody. Second, it comprised self-contained sections of sixteen bars that each repeated once before giving way to a change; a typical pattern was aa bb a cc dd, with each letter representing a separate sixteen-measure section. Finally, it usually employed Western European harmonies, beginning and ending on a tonic key while changing in the middle to the subdominant. For instance, a piece that began in C would alternate to F and return to conclude in C.

Joplin and Scott had defined these elements by 1897, just as sales of ragtime sheet music began to boom. Later innovations such as shifted accents and dotted rhythms added to the body of hot, or syncopated, ragtime sounds, but they were not actually syncopated. Ragtime also influenced other African American styles, such as Blues and Jazz. In fact, jazz probably grew out of ragtime, a lineage apparent in the career of the great musician and composer Jelly Roll Morton.

White bandleader William Krell published the first ragtime piano music, a piece called “Mississippi Rag,” in 1897. Between 1897 and 1899 more than 150 “rags,” written by both blacks and whites, supplied popular demand. Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag,” released in 1899, sold a million copies in sheet music alone. Ragtime sold so well that New York music companies hurried to mass-produce it, slapping the name ragtime on a wide range of music. Hack writers churned out what they called ragtime vocal music, which often contained little or no syncopation at all.

Although many listeners considered Irving Berlin's 1911 hit “Alexander's Ragtime Band” the crowning accomplishment of the ragtime era, the majority of innovations and the best composition had occurred ten years before. Nevertheless, public enthusiasm continued until the late 1910s, reflected in high piano and sheet music sales and the sheer volume of mediocre ragtime-style songs produced by New York's Tin Pan Alley.

The popularity of ragtime provoked much criticism, both from musical conservatives and from moral conservatives. Because ragtime's new rhythms inspired lively dancing, many older people found it threatening, and its syncopation sometimes caused musicians trained in simple European rhythms to find it cacophonous. The controversy reflected ragtime's revolutionary significance. By ushering in the Jazz Age and establishing African American rhythms as viable roots for classical music, ragtime challenged the old order, socially as well as musically. J. B. Priestly wrote, “Out of this ragtime came the fragmentary outlines of the menace to old Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the feeling of modern times.”

See also Dance, African American; Racial Stereotypes.

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