
, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light district
s of American cities such as St. Louis
and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. It was a modification of the march
made popular by John Philip Sousa
, with additional polyrhythm
s coming from African music.
"And although the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906" "...and there were 94 years to go!" "Wheee..."
"But what of the people who stay where they're put, Planted like flowers with roots underfoot? I know some of those people have hearts that would rather Go journeying on the sea."
"There was a time Our happiness seemed never-ending I was so sure That where we were heading was right Life was a road So certain and straight and unbending Our little road With never a cross road in sight Back in the days When we spoke in civilized voices Women in white And sturdy young men at the oar Back in the days When I let you make all my choices... We can never go back to before "
"Two men finding, for a moment, in the darkness, They're the same."
"You and your music, singing deep within me, making nice to me, saying something so new. Play that melody, your sweet melody, calling my heart to you."
"He wanted to say, I am sick of the injustices. He wanted to say, give me something to believe! In my sould I am your brother, we are bound to one another, angered by the darkness in light, and the lies we perceive."
"And her words rang out like arrows and they pierced him. He felt flushed and overheated as a boy as she filled and overwhelmed him with a fierce and sudden joy!"
"This is not the America he came here for. None of us did. None of us!"
"In the gutters of the city I have tried to find some meaning In the arms of fallen women In the thought of suicide Like a firework, unexploded, Wanting life but never knowing how..."
"And say to those who blame us for the way we chose to fightThat sometimes there are battles that are more than black or whiteAnd Icould not put down my sword when justice was my right."

, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light district
s of American cities such as St. Louis
and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. It was a modification of the march
made popular by John Philip Sousa
, with additional polyrhythm
s coming from African music. The ragtime composer Scott Joplin
became famous through the publication in 1899 of the "Maple Leaf Rag
" and a string of ragtime hits that followed, although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s. For at least 12 years after its publication, the "Maple Leaf Rag" heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody
lines, harmonic progressions
or metric patterns
.
Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz
claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since the music has been re-discovered. First in the early 1940s many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 rpm records. A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s as a wider variety of ragtime styles of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed, published, and recorded. In 1971 Joshua Rifkin
brought out a compilation of Scott Joplin's work which was nominated for a Grammy Award
, and in 1973, the motion picture The Sting
brought ragtime to a wide audience with its soundtrack of Joplin tunes. Subsequently, the film's rendering of Joplin's 1902 rag "The Entertainer
" was a Top 5 hit in 1974.
Ragtime (with Joplin's work at the forefront) has been cited as an American equivalent of minuet
s by Mozart
, mazurka
s by Chopin
, or waltz
es by Brahms
. Ragtime influenced classical
composers including Erik Satie
, Claude Debussy
and Igor Stravinsky
.
Historical context
Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century, descending from the jigs and march music played by black bands. By the start of the 20th century it became widely popular throughout North America and was listened and danced to, performed, and written by people of many different subcultures. A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music, especially the marches made popular by John Philip Sousa.

. In 1895, black entertainer Ernest Hogan
published two of the earliest sheet music
rags, one of which ("All Coons Look Alike to Me") eventually sold a million copies. As fellow black musician Tom Fletcher said, Hogan was the "first to put on paper the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians." While the song's success helped introduce the country to ragtime rhythms, its use of racial slurs created a number of derogatory imitation tunes, known as "coon songs" because of their use of extremely racist and stereotypical
images of blacks. In Hogan's later years he admitted shame and a sense of "race betrayal" for the song while also expressing pride in helping bring ragtime to a larger audience.
The emergence of mature ragtime is usually dated to 1897, the year in which several important early rags were published. In 1899, Scott Joplin
's "Maple Leaf Rag
" was published, which became a great hit and demonstrated more depth and sophistication than earlier ragtime. Ragtime was one of the main influences on the early development of jazz (along with the blues
). Some artists, like Jelly Roll Morton
, were present and performed both ragtime and jazz styles during the period the two genres overlapped. Jazz largely surpassed ragtime in mainstream popularity in the early 1920s, although ragtime compositions continue to be written up to the present, and periodic revivals of popular interest in ragtime occurred in the 1950s and the 1970s.
The heyday of ragtime predated the widespread availability of sound recording. Like classical music, and unlike jazz, classical ragtime was and is primarily a written tradition, being distributed in sheet music
rather than through recordings or by imitation of live performances. Ragtime music was also distributed via piano rolls for player pianos. A folk ragtime
tradition also existed before and during the period of classical ragtime (a designation largely created by Scott Joplin's publisher John Stillwell Stark
), manifesting itself mostly through string bands, banjo and mandolin clubs (which experienced a burst of popularity during the early 20th Century), and the like.
A form known as novelty piano
(or novelty ragtime) emerged as the traditional rag was fading in popularity. Where traditional ragtime depended on amateur pianists and sheet music sales, the novelty rag took advantage of new advances in piano-roll technology and the phonograph record to permit a more complex, pyrotechnic, performance-oriented style of rag to be heard. Chief among the novelty rag composers is Zez Confrey
, whose "Kitten on the Keys" popularized the style in 1921.
Ragtime also served as the roots for stride piano
, a more improvisational piano style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Elements of ragtime found their way into much of the American popular music of the early 20th century. It also played a central role in the development of the musical style later referred to as Piedmont blues
; indeed, much of the music played by such artists of the genre as Reverend Gary Davis
, Blind Boy Fuller
, Elizabeth Cotten
, and Etta Baker
, could be referred to as "ragtime guitar."
Although most ragtime was composed for piano, transcriptions for other instruments and ensembles are common, notably including Gunther Schuller
's arrangements of Joplin's rags. Ragtime guitar continued to be popular into the 1930s, usually in the form of songs accompanied by skilled guitar work. Numerous records emanated from several labels, performed by Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Lemon Jefferson, and others. Occasionally ragtime was scored for ensembles, (particularly dance bands and brass band
s) similar to those of James Reese Europe
, or as songs like those written by Irving Berlin
. Joplin had long-standing ambitions for the synthesizing for the worlds of ragtime and opera
, to which end the opera Treemonisha
was written. However its first performance, poorly staged with Joplin accompanying on the piano, was "disastrous" and it was never to be fully performed again in Joplin's lifetime. In fact the score was lost for decades, then rediscovered in 1970, with a fully orchestrated and staged performance in 1972. An earlier opera by Joplin, A Guest of Honor, has been lost.
Musical form
The rag was a modification of the marchmade popular by John Philip Sousa
, with additional polyrhythm
s coming from African music. It was usually written in 2/4 or 4/4 time
with a predominant left hand pattern of bass notes on odd-numbered beats and chords on even-numbered beats accompanying a syncopated melody in the right hand. According to some sources the name "ragtime" may come from the "ragged or syncopated rhythm" of the right hand. A rag written in 3/4 time is a "ragtime waltz."
Ragtime is not a "time" (meter) in the same sense that march time is 2/4 meter and waltz time is 3/4 meter; it is rather a musical genre that uses an effect that can be applied to any meter. The defining characteristic of ragtime music is a specific type of syncopation in which melodic accents occur between metrical beats. This results in a melody that seems to be avoiding some metrical beats of the accompaniment by emphasizing notes that either anticipate or follow the beat ("a rhythmic base of metric affirmation, and a melody of metric denial"). The ultimate (and intended) effect on the listener is actually to accentuate the beat, thereby inducing the listener to move to the music. Scott Joplin, the composer/pianist known as the "King of Ragtime", called the effect "weird and intoxicating." He also used the term "swing" in describing how to play ragtime music: "Play slowly until you catch the swing...". The name swing
later came to be applied to an early genre of jazz that developed from ragtime. Converting a non-ragtime piece of music into ragtime by changing the time values of melody notes is known as "ragging" the piece. Original ragtime pieces usually contain several distinct themes, four being the most common number. These themes were typically 16 bars, each theme divided into periods of four four-bar phrases and arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises. Typical patterns were AABBACCC′, AABBACCDD and AABBCCA, with the first two strains in the tonic key and the following strains in the subdominant. Sometimes rags would include introductions of four bars or bridges, between themes, of anywhere between four and 24 bars.
Styles of ragtime

s" of the period such as the foxtrot
. Many of the terms associated with ragtime have inexact definitions, and are defined differently by different experts; the definitions are muddled further by the fact that publishers often labelled pieces for the fad of the moment rather than the true style of the composition. There is even disagreement about the term "ragtime" itself; experts such as David Jasen and Trebor Tichenor
choose to exclude ragtime songs from the definition but include novelty piano and stride piano (a modern perspective), while Edward A. Berlin includes ragtime songs and excludes the later styles (which is closer to how ragtime was viewed originally). The terms below should not be considered exact, but merely an attempt to pin down the general meaning of the concept.
- CakewalkCakewalkThe Cakewalk dance was developed from a "Prize Walk" done in the days of slavery, generally at get-togethers on plantations in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around"...
- A pre-ragtime dance form popular until about 1904. The music is intended to be representative of an African-American dance contest in which the prize is a cake. Many early rags are cakewalks. - Characteristic march - A march incorporating idiomatic touches (such as syncopation) supposedly characteristic of the race of their subject, which is usually African-Americans. Many early rags are characteristic marches.
- Two-stepTwo-step (dance move)The two-step is a step found in many folk dances, and in various other dances. It seems to take its name from the 19th century dance related to the Polka....
- A pre-ragtime dance form popular until about 1911. A large number of rags are two-steps. - Slow dragSlow drag (dance)The Slow drag is an American social dance originally performed to ragtime music, and has been resurrected as part of blues dancing.-History:Ragtime composers, including Scott Joplin, wrote a number of slow-tempo tunes appropriate for the dance...
- Another dance form associated with early ragtime. A modest number of rags are slow drags. - Coon songCoon songCoon songs were a genre of music popular in the United States and around the English-speaking world from 1880 to 1920, that presented a racist and stereotyped image of blacks.-Rise and fall from popularity:...
- A pre-ragtime vocal form popular until about 1901. A song with crude, racist lyrics often sung by white performers in blackface. Gradually died out in favor of the ragtime song. Strongly associated with ragtime in its day, it is one of the things that gave ragtime a bad name. - Ragtime song - The vocal form of ragtime, more generic in theme than the coon song. Though this was the form of music most commonly considered "ragtime" in its day, many people today prefer to put it in the "popular music" category. Irving BerlinIrving BerlinIrving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history.His first hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", became world famous...
was the most commercially successful composer of ragtime songs, and his "Alexander's Ragtime BandAlexander's Ragtime Band"Alexander's Ragtime Band" is the name of a song by Irving Berlin. It was his first major hit, in 1911. There is some evidence, although inconclusive, that Berlin borrowed the melody from a draft of "A Real Slow Drag" submitted by Scott Joplin that had been submitted to a...
" (1911) was the single most widely performed and recorded piece of this sort, even though it contains virtually no ragtime syncopation. Gene GreeneGene GreeneEugene Delbert Greene , better known as Gene Greene was an American entertainer, singer and composer, nicknamed The Ragtime King. He was a vaudeville star and made some of the earliest sound recordings of scat singing in 1911 for Columbia Records and Victor Records and was a popular Ragtime performer...
was a famous singer in this style. - Folk ragtimeFolk ragtimeFolk ragtime is a subgenre of ragtime, a distinctly American music. It is thought to have originated with illiterate itinerant African American piano players, who learned the syncopated music not formally, but through their peers. Folk Ragtime as a form stayed active until the early 1920s, when...
- A name often used to describe ragtime that originated from small towns or assembled from folk strains, or at least sounded as if they did. Folk rags often have unusual chromatic features typical of composers with non-standard training. - Classic ragClassic RagClassic Rag is a term used to describe the style of ragtime composition pioneered by Scott Joplin and the Missouri school of ragtime composers...
- A name used to describe the Missouri-style ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin, James Scott, and others. - Fox-trotFoxtrot (Dance)The foxtrot is a smooth progressive dance characterized by long, continuous flowing movements across the dance floor. It is danced to big band music, and the feeling is one of elegance and sophistication...
- A dance fad which began in 1913. Fox-trots contain a dotted-note rhythm different from that of ragtime, but which nonetheless was incorporated into many late rags. - Novelty pianoNovelty pianoNovelty Piano is a genre of piano music that was popular during the 1920s.A successor to ragtime and an outgrowth of the piano roll music of the teens, novelty piano can be considered a pianistic cousin of jazz, which appeared around the same time....
- A piano composition emphasizing speed and complexity which emerged after World War I. It is almost exclusively the domain of white composers. - Stride pianoStride pianoHarlem Stride Piano, Stride Piano, or just Stride, is a jazz piano style that was developed in the large cities of the East Coast, mainly in the New York, during 1920s and 1930s. The left hand may play a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, seventh or tenth interval on the first and...
- A style of piano which emerged after World War I, developed by and dominated by black East coast pianists (James P. JohnsonJames P. JohnsonJames P. Johnson was an American pianist and composer...
, Fats WallerFats WallerFats Waller , born Thomas Wright Waller, was a jazz pianist, organist, composer, singer, and comedic entertainer...
and Willie 'The Lion' Smith). Together with novelty piano, it may be considered a successor to ragtime, but is not considered by all to be "genuine" ragtime. Johnson composed the song that is arguably most associated with the Roaring Twenties, "CharlestonCharleston (dance)The Charleston is a dance named for the harbor city of Charleston, South Carolina. The rhythm was popularized in mainstream dance music in the United States by a 1923 tune called "The Charleston" by composer/pianist James P. Johnson which originated in the Broadway show Runnin' Wild and became one...
." A recording of Johnson playing the song appears on the compact disc, James P. Johnson: Harlem Stride Piano (Jazz Archives No. 111, EPM, Paris, 1997). Johnson's recorded version has a ragtime flavor.
Ragtime revivals
In the early 1940s many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire, and as early as 1936 78 rpm records of Joplin's compositions were produced. Old numbers written for piano were rescored for jazz instruments by jazz musicians, which gave the old style a new sound. The most famous recording of this period is Pee Wee Hunt's version of Euday L. Bowman
's "Twelfth Street Rag
."
A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s. A wider variety of ragtime styles of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed, published, and recorded. Much of the ragtime recorded in this period is presented in a light-hearted novelty style, looked to with nostalgia as the product of a supposedly more innocent time. A number of popular recordings featured "prepared pianos," playing rags on pianos with tacks on the hammers and the instrument deliberately somewhat out of tune, supposedly to simulate the sound of a piano in an old honky tonk
.
Three events brought forward a different kind of ragtime revival in the 1970s. First, pianist Joshua Rifkin
brought out a compilation of Scott Joplin's work, Scott Joplin: Piano Rags
, on Nonesuch Records
, which was nominated for a Grammy
in the "Best Classical Performance - Instrumental Soloist(s) without Orchestra" category in 1971. This recording reintroduced Joplin's music to the public in the manner the composer had intended, not as a nostalgic stereotype but as serious, respectable music. Second, the New York Public Library
released a two-volume set of "The Collected Works of Scott Joplin," which renewed interest in Joplin among musicians and prompted new stagings of Joplin's opera
Treemonisha
. Finally, with the release of the motion picture The Sting
in 1973, which had a Marvin Hamlisch
soundtrack of Joplin tunes, ragtime was brought to a wide audience. Hamlisch's rendering of Joplin's 1902 rag "The Entertainer" won an Academy Award, and was an American Top 40
hit in 1974, reaching #3 on 18 May.
In 1998, an adaption of E.L. Doctorow's historic novel, Ragtime
was produced on Broadway. With music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, the show featured several rags as well as songs in other musical genres.
In modern times, younger musicians have again begun to find ragtime, and incorporate it into their musical repertoires. Such acts include Jay Chou
, The Kitchen Syncopators, Inkwell Rhythm Makers, Curtains for you
, The Gallus Brothers and the not-quite as young Baby Gramps
or Bob Milne
.
Ragtime composers

. Joseph Lamb
and James Scott
are, together with Joplin, acknowledged as the three most sophisticated ragtime composers. Other leading ragtime composers include Jelly Roll Morton
, Eubie Blake
, Charles L. Johnson
, Tom Turpin
, May Aufderheide
, Mike Bernard
, George Botsford
, Zez Confrey
, Ben Harney
, Luckey Roberts
, Paul Sarebresole
, and Wilbur Sweatman
.
Modern ragtime composers include William Bolcom
, Trebor Tichenor, David Thomas Roberts
, Max Morath
and Reginald Robinson
.
In addition, classical
composers were influenced by the form with, for example, Igor Stravinsky
's solo piano work Piano-Rag-Music
from 1919, and Claude Debussy
's Golliwogg's Cakewalk (from the 1908 Piano Suite Children's Corner
), and General Lavine (from his Preludes
). Stravinsky also included a ragtime in his theater piece L'histoire du soldat (1918).
Samples
- Download recording — "The Wagon" ragtime from the Library of Congress' Gordon Collection; an early ragtime song sung by Ben Harney in Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia, PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
on about September 9, 1925
External links
- Origins of Rag
- Rag time Blog
- Interview with Ragtime Pianist and Historian Max Morath on AdventuresInMusic.biz, 2005
- "Perfessor" Bill Edwards' Ragtime/Old-time Piano Gallery
- Swedish Ragtime Home Page
- The late John Roache's MIDI ragtime library
- Ragtime history in France
- Rocky Mountain Ragtime Radio
- Elite Syncopations Radio
- Aussie Dixieland/Ragtime Radio
- Classic Ragtime Piano by Ted Tjaden
- Warren Trachtman's Ragtime MIDI Website
- Ragtime Guitar Arrangements
- Rag's Rag - Free Ragtime Music And Scores