Many Americans of my generation know a little something about ragtime music, thanks to a revival of the form in the 1970s. The revival (one of many during the 20th century) began when the Nonesuch label released the first of a three-volume set of Scott Joplin rags, played faithfully on piano by Joshua Rifkin. It reached its height with Marvin Hamlisch’s arrangement of Joplin’s “The Entertainer” as the theme for the Paul Newman-Robert Redford movie The Sting.
What most of us don’t know is that ragtime was not originally recorded as piano music. Real Ragtime, the very first in a series of invaluable releases by Archeophone, should help set the record straight.
This lengthy, extremely well-documented CD contains 28 ragtime numbers, recorded between 1898 and 1922, featuring everything from accordion to military marching band, most prominently the banjo, with nary a solo piano performance to be found. Of course, the piano was the most common instrument found in middle-class American homes in the early years of the century, so when people bought sheet music of their favorite rags (and they did, by the millions), it was usually for piano. And the piano’s division of the keyboard into left and right hands for the bass part and the melody naturally lends itself to ragtime’s steady bass beat and syncopated or “ragged” melodies. But it wasn’t by any means thought of by its composers as piano music.
It’s too bad that liner notes today are restricted to the five-inch square CD box format, because this and all the other Archeophone releases cry out for the treatment that could be given to long-playing 33 rpm records. Archeophone puts as much information as it possibly can into this format, which means it has to use a very small typeface that’s hard for us aging Boomers to read. But that’s a minor complaint, and I’d rather have more information than less.
As it is, each of the 28 tracks is completely annotated in a thick booklet that includes good graphics, a history of the genre, and a selected bibliography, all of which is a great help to enjoying this music.
But so much of this music speaks for itself. Ragtime highlights the playful, silly side of American culture at the turn of the 20th century, and it established trends in music and entertainment that still reverberate today. It’s hard to listen to many of these songs, for instance, without thinking of them as the soundtrack for a Keystone Kops movie or a Looney Tunes cartoon, and you can still hear similar playfulness and wordplay in much of the better American comedy and children’s entertainment at the turn of yet another century.
We’re also confronted by what today seems like casual racism in some of these selections. Ragtime was seen as “coon” music, illustrative of what northern white Americans thought of as the happy-go-lucky temperament of Blacks in the South. So we get Irving Berlin rhyming “coon” with moon and soon in “Wild Cherry Rag,” among several examples of this attitude.
Archeophone explains in the notes on this and other releases that it believes in presenting this material in the spirit of historical accuracy, rather than censoring it and pretending it didn’t exist. I agree entirely with the label’s reasoning; this music tells us a lot about ourselves as a people, and can show us how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go.
On to the music, then. I can’t possibly review each of the 28 tracks on this dazzling collection. Each is significant and carefully chosen, and seems a good example of the genre. So, a few words about the tracks that stand out for me. (The sound, by the way, is startlingly clear on most tracks, considering their age and recording techniques of 100 years ago.)
“Dill Pickles Rag” is unique, a rag for solo xylophone with orchestra. It’s an incredibly catchy tune, one of the best examples of a rag I’ve ever heard. This song seems to be nothing less than an avatar of the vibrancy and exuberance that define ragtime, and it’s no surprise that it was the second rag to sell over 1 million copies of sheet music, right behind Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”
How often do we think of John Phillip Sousa and ragtime together? But the March King’s band probably introduced more Americans and Europeans to the syncopation of the cakewalk and rag than any other group, even though the marching band members were uncomfortable with the ragged rhythm. Here we have several good examples of military-type bands playing rags, including Sousa’s on “Hu-la Hu-la Cake Walk” in 1901; the Victor Military Band doing “Booster Fox Trot;” and Arthur Pryor’s band (a refugee from Sousa’s outfit) with Canhanibalmo Rag. The latter number, recorded in 1911, in spite of its title is a refreshingly serious treatment of ragtime, among numerous novelty takes.
Several tracks offer ragtime treatments of classical pieces, including the “Ragged William Two-Step” from the “William Tell Overture;” “Russian Rag,” a variation on a Rachmaninoff prelude; and “Hungarian Rag,” an accordion rag based on Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.”
Another Berlin piece, the vocal duet “International Rag,” features lyrical gymnastics on lines like “All hands are dancing to a raggedy melody, full of originality” that remind me of Gilbert & Sullivan.
“The King of Rags” by Arthur Pryor’s military band is a wildly playful piece, juxtaposing trombones, flutes and castanets among many other instruments. You can’t help smiling when you hear many of the pieces on this CD, and this is the best example of ragtime’s infectious good humor.
I could go on and on. If you like early American music, if you’re interested in the origins of jazz, Broadway show music, and other American pop forms, you should own this disc. More information and samples on the Archeophone website.
(Archeophone, 1998)
