# Images from the ragtime era



## Guest (Apr 11, 2016)

Don't worry, nothing overtly racist although the subject race will be impossible to avoid but I'll avoid the really nasty images. But I though I'd share some of the images and clips I've collected over the years. I'll share info and factoids as best I know them but I can't guarantee the accuracy of all of them. It's rather shocking to realize how little we actually know about this era. Americans know more about music published three centuries ago in Europe than they do about the music published at the turn of the last century in their own country. And yet, it had _such_ an impact on the music that came after. As an analogy, most Americans know little about the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and yet its impact on our culture was immense. Foods as shredded wheat, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Cream O' Wheat and what not all debuted at the fair in Chicago and shredded wheat was condemned as horrible and there was no way it would ever be acceptable on breakfast table across America. All carnivals and fairs to this day are set up the same way the columbian Exposition was--a midway with sideshows, a Ferris wheel (which was invented for the Exposition and was its centerpiece attraction), dancing girls, freakshows, etc. and the song "The Streets of Cairo" (written by Sol Bloom who also invented the concept of the carnival midway for the Exposition) were all immensely influential.






Another thing that debuted at the Exposition was a new form of music called "ragtime." It started off as barnyard dance music played by blacks on banjos and harmonicas throughout the South. It left the barnyards via the waterways and so melded with riverboat songs. By the 1880s, Irish jig piano was all the rage and black pianists began mixing the ragtime with jig to develop piano ragtime--its most popular form. Another influence was the marching band. Every city and town in America had at least one (it's still that way in England and Wales from what I can gather). So, with piano ragtime, the left hand played the straight 1-2-1-2 marching rhythm while right hand played the syncopated rhythms which made the timing sound jumpy or "ragged" and hence the term ragtime. Although other sources point out that "rags" were dances popular among blacks in the early 1890s in areas as Topeka and the music was developed specifically to accompany these dances but the the term "ragtime" is not found in print until 1896. The first rag was said to be one called "Proctor Knott" whose author is unknown although a 1909 edition of the _St. Louis Post-Dispatch_ attributed it to a black woman in St. Louis and called her the true inventor of ragtime--be that as it may.

Another dance that was very popular and often associated with ragtime was the cakewalk. The cakewalk goes back to minstrelsy and so ragtime and minstrelsy share some common ground. In fact, ragtime, in many ways, was simply latter-day minstrelsy. There was also a form of music called the cakewalk and most scholars refer to it either as a form of ragtime or a closely associated form or an early form of ragtime. Scholars, however, differ greatly on what makes a cakewalk different from a rag. Generally, cakewalks are more march oriented but I have found not to always be the case.


















This cover is more closely related to minstrelsy than the previous photo and some feel it may even be depicting a white man in blackface although Fred Lyons was a black man.









Cakewalking originated among slaves who would don their best finery--always hand-me-downs from the master's family--and dance with exaggerated moves with high kicks while waving their top-hats and swinging their canes. This was a satire of the high-falutin' dance moves the slaves saw whites doing in the big house. Whites, though, thought it was an authentic African dance which it definitely was not (confirmed by Africans themselves knew of no such dances in Africa). so whites would, in turn, imitate the blacks who were imitating them. The winning couple won a huge cake as a prize but everyone would help them eat it because it was so enormous. To win was to "take the cake" and that is where we get the term.









Another example.









Another.





Riverboat song.


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## Guest (Apr 11, 2016)

"Cold Morning Shout" by the South Street Trio of Philadelphia is a good example of the earliest form of ragtime. Bobby Leecan was the band's banjoist. Robert Cooksey played harmonica and Alfred Martin was the guitarist.


















Aida Overton and George Walker were a husband and wife team of vaudevillians who performed music and comedy. They were superb cakewalkers which they are doing in the photo. Walker was also partner with Bert Williams. Williams and Walker were extremely popular singers and cakewalkers in the early 1900s.









Williams & Walker with Aida Overton. Bert Walker wore blackface onstage even though he was a black man. His complexion was light and his facial features rather more like a white man than a black man but he was also, in tongue-and-cheek fashion, imitating whites that imitated blacks.









Europeans were also crazy about cakewalking.









A black piano teacher gives his white student a lesson. This was a time of changing attitudes towards race and images as this were not uncommon. Most of Joplin's students were white. While the Southern Lynch Laws were in full force at this time, the rest of the country reviled the practice. In Sedalia, Missouri, where Joplin lived out his more prolific years, the local newspapers often carried editorials pronouncing the lynchings of blacks in the South as barbaric and disgusting. Unfortunately, many blacks today seem to think the entire country was like the South back then but this is not true. The country was segregated but not nearly as rigidly as in the South where a white person and a black person even sharing a park bench resulted in both being arrested.


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## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

Victor if there was prize for most interesting recent threads on here I'd vote for yours. Thank you.

Last year I read the newly published Electric Shock a book purporting to be a history of recorded popular music. He put Ragtime right at the heart of the early recording industry and the implication was that during its heyday it was THE most popular form. The book was very well reviewed but I spotted several errors - no matter how many times he wrote it, John McCormack was NOT a Baritone.

The author's claim
"The further back I went with my research, however, and the more music I listened to, the more I realised that the two most important moments in 20th century pop actually took place in the late 19th century - around 1890, in fact. The first was the invention of recorded sound as a commercial artefact; the second was the emergence of ragtime, which was African-American music, aimed at the young, and often intended to make people dance. In my opinion, 1890 marked the dividing line between ancient and modern in popular music history. You can trace almost everything that's happened since then back to that moment."

I had not previously seen it at the centre of Popular Music. At a time when there was no radio, I had always believed it to be a niche music whose appeal was to the urban poor. Early "Race" music if you like. Given the other errors I'd dismissed his claim, but do you have a view about how important Ragtime was in the development of popular music?


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

Very interesting stuff on this thread! Re Fred Lyons, I read somewhere- it might have been the ghosted autobiography of Sammy Davis Jr- that black vaudeville performers did sometimes wear blackface! So Fred might have been blacked up, as well as being black, maybe?

I think 'Take the cake' goes back to Aristophanes at least, but the dance looks fun. 

Edited to add: sorry Victor, I missed your remark about Bert Walker, a black performer in blackface! So obviously this really was a thing in the early twentieth century!


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## Antiquarian (Apr 29, 2014)

Victor Redseal thank you. I had entirely neglected listening to this type of music. I'm going to revisit some of my old 78s, and some of Al Jolson's Kraft Music Hall Recordings. Should bring back some memories...


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

Antiquarian said:


> Victor Redseal thank you. I had entirely neglected listening to this type of music. I'm going to revisit some of my old 78s, and some of Al Jolson's Kraft Music Hall Recordings. Should bring back some memories...


Sounds fantastic, Antiquarian! I don't think I have anything like that in my collection- ragtime records seem to be uncommon in the UK- though I have an enviable number of records by the great 'baritone' John McCormack! Al Jolson is one of my very favourites too, although all the 78s I have of his are Brunswicks from the 40s, when what I really love is the unstoppable energy and relatively unmannered style of his early recordings. I guess this repertoire is the commercialised Tin Pan Alley version of ragtime though, and not something for the 'purists'- no offence to Victor Redseal, of course!


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## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

The one writer on popular music I've never found reason to argue with is Donald Clarke. In the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music he writes.

"Ragtime. The second internationally popular genre in modern popular music after minstrelsy, sweeping the world between c1897-1920:"

It is clear that there's much more to listen to than just the superb Scott Joplin.


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## Guest (Apr 11, 2016)

Figleaf said:


> Very interesting stuff on this thread! Re Fred Lyons, I read somewhere- it might have been the ghosted autobiography of Sammy Davis Jr- that black vaudeville performers did sometimes wear blackface! So Fred might have been blacked up, as well as being black, maybe?
> 
> I think 'Take the cake' goes back to Aristophanes at least, but the dance looks fun.
> 
> Edited to add: sorry Victor, I missed your remark about Bert Walker, a black performer in blackface! So obviously this really was a thing in the early twentieth century!


Bert Williams, you mean.

As for Aristophanes, I don't believe his reference to "the cake is ours" had anything to with taking the cake. That term was very common in the 19th century due to cakewalking and I have to believe it descends from that. One source mentioned "taking the cakes" in horse-racing and that's interesting because if "Proctor Knott" was the first true ragtime song, it was about a race horse.

A 1913 article in the _Journal of American Folk-Lore_ printed a version of "Proctor Knott" that the author states was collected in 1909 from the rural whites of Mississippi:

_Bet your money on Proctor Knott!
He's a horse of mine.
Done quit runnin';
He's gone to flyin',
All the way from Little Rock.
Bet your money of Proctor Knott,
Proctor Knott run so fast
You couldn't see nothing but the jockeys a ss.
_


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Great photographs, and interesting history!


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## Guest (Apr 11, 2016)

Very old footage of cakewalking couples.









Wonderful photo of Williams & Walker. They also did a bit of recording. Bert Williams was one of the three highest paid entertainers in the country in his heyday. George Walker contracted syphilis and was senile by 1910, according to an old newspaper article I have from that year. He died in 1911. Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies where white actors threatened to walk out rather than perform onstage with a black man. Ziegfeld told them to go right ahead because Williams was the star and Ziegfeld could always find replacements for the rest of them who would be nothing less than thrilled to perform with Williams. They stayed. The shows were so successful that Williams stayed on twice as long as his contract stipulated. He was wildly popular all the way to the year of his death in 1922 after which there was a great outpouring of grief around the world.









Aida Overton, known as the Queen of the Cakewalk, was quite popular independent of her stint with Williams & Walker. She was an excellent performer who refused to do stereotypical shticks--no mammies, no maids or anything like that--but wore extravagant costumes and hairstyles and became a role model to the black female stars who followed her over the years. She played roles that were usually reserved for white actresses and she was renowned for her beauty. She was also a choreographer and worked for many dance troupes over the years in that role. After her husband's death, she continued to be very popular and many of her dances became crazes which swept the nation and some of her shows were held over due to demand. She did not long survive her husband, however, dying in 1914 and age 34.


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## Guest (Apr 12, 2016)

A very early blackface minstrel number from about 1829.

The word "minstrel" shares the same root with minister-a servant, entertainer or imperial household officer. The word also meant a poet, a storyteller, a jester, a juggler, a workman. The French used the word to apply to musicians employed by the court to compose and play music for various events. But the word came to apply to itinerant musicians who traveled about seeking employment or what we call gigs. In the 18th century, the word came to mean essentially the same thing as a bard-a singer of heroic poetry accompanying himself on a lyre or other stringed instrument although this sense was limited to the medieval era. But starting in the 19th century in America, minstrel took on a whole new meaning.

Today, we tend to regard the American minstrel era as one of shameful racism where white people dressed in shabby clothes, smeared burnt cork on their faces, snatched up banjos and pranced around singing the way they thought blacks sang and danced. They mocked blacks and perpetuated stereotypes. As we will see, this is largely untrue. First, we should point out that whites performing in blackface preceded the minstrel era and that, while we generally say blackface minstrelsy started in America in the 1840s, the evidence shows that it had its beginnings in the 1820s. Like everything, minstrelsy evolved from something largely unrelated to what it eventually became.

In this case, we are dealing with the feelings of white people towards the color black. By studying the various roles of black characters in the theatre of the early 19th century in both Europe and America, we get an idea of what factors were at play (and many of them still play). Blackness we have always associated with fear and the unknown but also the low and the vulgar. A popular play in England called "The One Hundred-Pound Note" featured a bootblack named Billy Black whose face is always sooty. When the play came to America in 1827, Billy Black's character was changed to black boy. The sootiness of his face and his occupation made the association natural to Americans.

Going back to the 18th century, the play "An Irishman in London-The Happy African," was a farce written by William McCready that came to America in 1793. In it, a black maid named Cubba (played by a white woman, of course) and an Irishman named Murtoch are presented as outsiders to high white culture (Irish were not considered "white" back then). Murtoch is brought low by McCready's device of symbolically transferring Cubba's blackness to Murtoch.

Then, of course, there is "Othello." However Shakespeare intended the play to taken by the virtually all-white audiences that were the only ones to see it 300 years after it was written (1603), those whites took it to be a vindication of the moral wrongness of miscegenation-of course, by this, we mean specifically between black males and white females. White males took sexual relations with black female concubines as virtual birthright. No less a notable that John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, who stood opposed to slavery, decried the interracial relationship stating that "the passion of Desdemona for Othello is unnatural, solely and exclusively because of his color." Adams was far from alone in his sentiment. He expressed the white male majority opinion.

So blackness as seen by white audiences in America as something "other" and something "low." Black could never assimilate and so would always be on the outside. This, again, harks back to the subconscious idea that black represents the unknown, the unknowable, the shadow, the devil.

In Holland, they celebrate Christmas on December 6 as Saint Nicholas Day. The Dutch depict Nicholas as a bishop who ride a white horse. Running or walking alongside Nicholas is a fellow they call Zwarte Piet or Black Pete. He usually carries a sack of switches to beat the bad children with while Nicholas or Sinterklaas hands out the gifts to the good children. Pete is the shadow twin of Santa, his dark side. He's lower than Sinterklaas and so runs alongside him instead on the horse with Nicholas.

The Dutch celebrate their Christmas as we do in America-with people dressing as Santa. The difference is that the Dutch also have people-often women-dress as Pete. They blacken their faces and don a Moorish costume. Here we see the difference between the subconscious motives and the narratives the conscious mind creates to explain them. Pete is black because he represents the "Other" or the "Outsider" but the Dutch decide to depict him as a Moor because consciously they cannot otherwise explain his blackness.









It's clear that Pete isn't intended to be endearing to the Dutch children. He is meant to be seen as sinister and intimidating. His blackness demonstrates his evilness. According to the French legend, after Nicholas resurrected three butchered boys, their killer, Père Fouettard, becomes the servant of Nicholas and delivers punishments to bad children. Again, his evilness makes him a dark character and his name is a variation of Pierre or Peter and so he is Black Pete and not a Moor. According to Dutch legend, Pete abducts bad children and sells them into slavery in Spain.









"Oh, look, honey! A bishop and a Moor are in the house abducting the children on Christmas morning!"

In early Santa legends, was known as ru Klas ("Rough Klaus") or Knecht Ruprecht who even sports horns. Ruprecht is the Germanic form of Rupert or Robert. He is sometimes called St. Rupert or St. Robert. The word "knecht" ties back to the word "minstrel" as it means "servant" or "farmhand." In fact, Zwarte Piet is often referred to as "Knecht." So there is that low, black servant angle again.

There appears to be a connection between Zwarte Piet and blackface minstrelsy in the U.S. In Europe, mumming plays were popular for centuries and were put on in people's kitchens for a small fee, the blackface character in the play was not an African but the evil character who slays the hero and takes his girl (played by a man in drag). A physician appears and heals the hero and resurrects him. The hero then revives and confronts the blackface character and, after a prolonged fight, would kill him and take his girl back. This play was an ancient reenactment of the sun/hero dying during the winter months when darkness prevails (the blackface villain) and then being reborn after Christmas Day and waxing stronger until his light banishes the dark. The play is actually never-ending and cyclical. Minstrelsy was probably descended from mumming plays since minstrel performances were originally put on in people's kitchens and some of the players wore blackface. Eventually, blackface minstrelsy became its own genre. Even black minstrels wore blackface. Perhaps coincidentally, some old minstrel sheet music attributes authorship to "Santa Claus."









Mummers of St. Alban's complete with blackface characters and a Santa Claus!









A mumming book where the villain is identified as Beelzebub and depicted as a black man and the hero as Oliver Cromwell.


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## Guest (Apr 12, 2016)

Morris dancers in blackface. This also ties back to Black Pete who was depicted as Moorish as the word "Morris" as used here is widely believed to be a corruption of the word "Moorish."

Black has also symbolized death as a rebirth, a period of gestation before new life emerges. While depicted dualistically in the mumming play, the light and dark come together as one through the Black Madonna and Bambino statues. Here, they are representations of the new moon whose face is black but gives the eminent promise of the new light. The statues were never meant to be taken as a depiction of an African mother and child.

Some may dispute that mumming plays have anything to do with American minstrelsy since the mumming play was never known to have come to the shores of the United States (although some believe mumming made it to Philadelphia). The link is that mumming plays were put on by young bachelors who went from house to house in London and other English cities offering to act out the drama for tips. The plays were put on in the kitchen. The mummers carried brooms or besoms with them with which they would sweep out an area in the kitchen-a way of magically purifying the area. The play was said to be so convincing that when the Hero is stabbed and the fake blood spilled out, members of the audience often screamed or fainted believing that something had gone wrong and the person really had been stabbed.

In America, minstrel shows were often put on in the kitchen with the area being swept clean first. Cockrell tells us of dance contest in Boston between two prostitutes-Nancy Holmes and Susan Bryant-at the Long Wharf. A reporter who was present wrote that a company of women came down the wharf in a trot. Each lady carried a broom. The reporter wrote: "…at the word of command, they all commenced to sweeping Long Wharf for a clean spot which was soon done." A "negro fiddler" provided the music. All the music was from the minstrel stage-"Miss Lucy Long," "What Did You Come From? (Knock a N-igger Down)," "Jenny Get Your *** Cake Done" and the last one not mentioned but said by the reporter to be a favorite dance tune of James Sanford who danced in "negro extravaganzas."

One of the most famous of the early blackface minstrel songs was "Clare de Kitchen" which has been done since at least 1832. Cockrell points out the verses show a very clear relationship to mumming:

_In old Kentuck in de arternoon,
We sweep de floor wid a bran new broom,
And dis de song dat we do sing,
Oh! Clare de kitchen old folks young folks
Clare de kitchen old folks young folks
Old Virginny never tire._

I have found an even firmer connection through the song "I've Been Working on the Railroad." While the song shows no evidence of being published before 1894, one verse is definitely from a much older song from England written in the 1830s or 40s by J. H. Cave:

_Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah
Someone's in the kitchen I know
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah
Strummin' on the old banjo!_

Whether Cave wrote this verse with these exact words is not known but the blackface minstrel E. P. Christy used it in his act as part of the song "Farewell Ladies" in 1847. It clearly refers to a minstrel performance in the kitchen and may have been revised from a mumming play in the kitchen.






The oldest folk festival in the United States is the Mummers Parade held every New Year's Day in Philadelphia. The parade's theme song is "O Dem Golden Slippers" by black minstrel singer and songwriter James A. Bland. They also perform the "Mummer's Strut" which they do in the fashion of a 19th century cakewalk dance.

So, we see that blackface has a long tradition in the West prior to the emergence of minstrelsy in the U.S. We see that its roots are embedded deeply into pagan notions of good and evil as represented in the stars and planets due to the need for a good planting and harvesting season. These ancient connections were so overgrown with more modern religious and racial detritus that the symbolism of blackness was transferred over to African slaves.









Seven-string minstrel banjo.


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## Guest (Apr 12, 2016)

Exactly who was the first man to don blackface and perform minstrel songs is open to question. We know it was being done by 1829 when George Washington Dixon began performing "Coal Black Rose" in blackface at the Bowery Theatre in New York.

To understand how this blackface form of entertainment took root, we must understand the nature of theatre at this time. Ever since ancient times in Europe, public entertainments were always held, well, in public. This hasn't changed much. We have all seen buskers and some of us are buskers ourselves. There are parks where plays are put on and so on. Mumming plays are often put on in public with someone passing the hat around. When people complained about loud entertainment in the streets, the city responded by passing ordinances to restrict or prohibit such performances. But the common people needed to have their outlets and so a theatre became necessary. Some towns had only one theatre while some had several. Regardless, the masses were not going to get more than one and even then not the entire theatre. So began the practice dividing the theatre into sections.

There was the pit for the commoners, workers, clerks, etcetera-a place in front of the stage where admission was general-and the boxes where the wealthier patrons sat. There was a middle section (service tier) for prostitutes because they often brought fairly wealthy clients-businessmen from out-of-town and the like-to the theatre. Way up in the balcony sat the poor and low class and even Blacks on occasion. This carried over well into the 20th century when Blacks in segregated areas had to sit up in the balcony when they were allowed in at all.

In the 1820s, some theatres did not take to minstrelsy at all, opera being preferred. Some theatres played opera on some nights and minstrelsy on others. Some theatres came to cater to lower class entertainments and dispensed with opera altogether. While other lighter forms of entertainment could share the same bill with opera, minstrelsy almost never did. On those rare occasions when minstrelsy did manage to get on the same bill with an opera, this was due to the performer having achieved a degree of fame that allowed it.

By 1830, this began to change. Minstrelsy had begun to be so popular that theatre-owners began to see the advantage of putting various entertainments on the same bill including opera and minstrelsy. While profit was the conscious motive, the underlying subconscious motive was the enforcement of communal codes of conduct. To deny the lower classes anywhere to enjoy their entertainments was courting disaster.

Minstrelsy itself has many roots in communal codes of conduct. We examined mumming plays earlier but another is the Callithumpians that were bands of young White men (usually bachelors) of low social status who marched through town, often in blackface, pounding pots and pans and making a lot of noise. They were popular from the 1820s through the 1840s and so it would seem many of them went over into minstrelsy itself.

One ritual of the Callithumpians that seems to have some tie to the mumming play is the charivari (pronounced "shiv-ar-ree") where a person was singled out by the group for engaging in behavior considered counter to community standards to be visited at midnight by masked men who would harass and even rough up the person depending on the offense. This was accompanied by a great deal of noise specifically to attract attention in hopes of shaming said offender and warning any other potential offenders into toeing the community line or leaving. This carried over from a medieval German secret society known as the Holy Vehm who also issued warnings and midnight visits to people seen as not doing proper. The Ku Klux Klan also practiced the same thing and not by coincidence.

We also have yet another connection to Santa Claus in the form of Pelznickel. Pelznickel (loosely translated as Nicholas the Punisher) of German lore wore fur and carried both switches and gifts, usually candies and nuts. He wore bells that jingled loudly so that the children could hear him coming (similar to the Callithumpian pot-banging). When he arrived at the house, the parents would open the door and then back away in mock fright. Pelznickel would enter and entice the children to sample the candies and nuts. When the children approached, he would swing at them with the switches. He would seem to know which child was bad and what he or she had done. Then he would make each child promise to be good. At obtaining the promise, he would reward the child with the treats. Afterwards, the parents would offer him food or drink which he would accept before leaving. In this way, the children learn a lesson: be good (that is, adhere to community standards of behavior) and be rewarded and also reward those who enforced these standards for protecting the community (this still carries on today where policemen on duty often receive free food at restaurants or at greatly reduced prices).

In Pieter Brueghel's 1559 masterpiece, _The Fight Between Carnival and Lent_. Here, the Lord of the Carnival, a form of the Lord of Misrule, is a fat man surrounded by an entourage. Blacks in the West Indies and the United States are very steeped in these traditions. This is also carried on in America at Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) with one man being chosen as the King of the Mardi Gras as well as the ceremony known as John Canoe or John Kooner which was long celebrated in North Carolina and is still celebrated in the West Indies where it appears to have originated although it appears to have roots in both Africa and Europe. As with the mummers, those in the procession of the man chosen to be John Canoe were young bachelors. As with the mummers, some of these men dressed as women (strangely some of the early klansmen in North Carolina also dressed as women during their night-rides).










From these roots, particularly John Canoe, do we finally get to the birth of blackface minstrelsy. When George Washington Dixon performed onstage, he did so as a blackface character known as Zip ****.









Note that he carries a broom or besom as well as a sword as did the mummers. John Canoe (below) often dressed as a military officer.









John Canoe.









The Pinkster King of New York. In the slave days of New York in the 18th century, a festival started on the Monday after Whit-Sunday and lasted a week. An area was laid out in a rectangle where "dancing and merry-making" took place. A slave named Charley of Pinkster Hill was declared the king of the revelers. He dressed in a military uniform that was mismatched in color and size. After Charley's death, the festival started to die with him and shut down completely around 1811. Today, it is resurrected for show. It could actually get very ribald. The Pinkster King bears a great resemblance to Zip **** above.


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## Guest (Apr 12, 2016)

Minstrelsy got started while Andrew Jackson was in office (1829-1837). During that time, there were a number of Northern Black men that were dandies-men who dressed to the nines and spoke the King's English. They were mostly looked down upon in white society. Dixon's Zip **** was just such a character or rather a lampoon of a Black dandy. In the song called "Ole Zip ****" he states:

*OLE ZIP *****

_(3x) O ole Zip **** he is a larned skoler,
Sings possum up a gum tree an coony in a holler.
(3x) Possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
Den over dubble trubble, Zip **** will jump.

Chorus:
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden duden duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.

O ist old Suky blue skin, she is in lub wid me
I went the udder arter noon to take a dish ob tea;
What do you tink now, Suky hab for supper,
Why chicken foot an possum heel, widout any butter.

Chorus:

Did you eber see the wild goose, sailing on de ocean,
O de wild goose motion is a berry pretty notion;
Ebry time de wild goose, beckens to de swaller,
You hear him google google google google gollar.

Chorus:

I went down to Sandy Hollar t'other arternoon
And the first man I chanced to meet war ole Zip ****;
Ole Zip **** he is a natty scholar,
For he plays upon de Banjo "Coony in de hollar".

Chorus:

My old Missus she's mad wid me,
Kase I would'nt go wid her into Tennessee
Massa build him barn and put in de fodder
Twas dis ting and dat ting one ting or odder.

Chorus:

I pose you heard ob de battle New Orleans,
Whar ole Gineral Jackson gib de British beans;
Dare de Yankee boys do de job so slick, creek.
For dey cotch old Packenham an rowed him up de first.

Chorus:

I hab many tings to tork about, but dont know wich come
So here de toast to old Zip **** before he gin to rust;
May he hab de pretty girls, like de King ob ole,
To sing dis song so many times, 'fore he turn to mole.

Chorus_

The song starts off with the typical racist content of the time concerning how Black people in America talked and names as "Suky" who is described as being so black that she's actually blue (or the other way around). The phrase "O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day" is, of course, the origin of the Walt Disney "Zippity doo dah zippity day" since the Disney song was a medley of old American folk tunes as one can hear the "Davy Crockett" melody in it as well.

The verse that starts off: "Did you eber see the wild goose, sailing on de ocean,
O de wild goose motion is a berry pretty notion" comes from a sailor shanty called "Wild Goose" or "The Wild Goose Shanty" which shanty man A. L. Lloyd sings:

Did you ever see a wild goose sailin' on the ocean / Ranzo ranzo away away/
It's just like them young girls when they take a notion / Ranzo ranzo away away

So one can see the various strands that came together to make blackface minstrelsy and it often comprised the lowest occupations and lifestyles-hunting raccoon and possum to eat and sailing whether it be a Navy ship, a merchant or a whaler-none were exactly prestigious-a sailor is a sailor.

Another version of "Zip ****" that Dixon sang goes:

_I tell you what will happen den, now bery soon
De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon
Dare General Jackson will him lampoon
An de bery nex president will be Zip ****
An when Zip **** our president shall be
He make all de little **** sing possum up a tree
O how de little ***** will dance and sing
Wen he tie dere tails togedder, cross de limb dey swing
Now mind wat you arter, you tarnel critter Crocket
You shan't go head widout ol' Zip, he is de boy to block it
Zip shall be president, Crocket shall be vice
An dey two togedder will hab tings nice_

In this version, the notions of honor at this period in American history are being mocked by the character of Zip ****, the Northern freedman dandy. We can see that these verses equate Jackson with Zip ****. "De bery nex president will be Zip ****" who is dressed as a general in a mismatched uniform is compared to Jackson, himself a former general. Jackson had a great appeal to the masses after he termed the aristocracy as "undemocratic." Yet Jackson was a part of the aristocracy since he was a slaveholder and had killed men in duels over honor-something the common people did not engage in.

"De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon" refers to Jackson's dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States which was both constitutional and providing a solid and steady currency. The currency, however, was fiat currency meaning it had no real value on its own except what was assigned to it by law (the U. S. dollar today is fiat currency). Jackson favored "hard money" which meant a gold or silver standard where paper money was a promissory note representing that amount of precious metal. Jackson called the Second Bank corrupt and when the Bank needed its charter renewed by 1836, Jackson vetoed the charter causing the Bank to collapse. This "common" man also aggressively enforced Indian removal and reversed himself in his support of states' rights when he refused to allow South Carolina to nullify federal law or secede from the Union.

The references to "Crocket" refer to Davy Crockett-the King of the Wild Frontier. Crockett had served in the Tennessee General Assembly and later in the U.S. House of Representatives. He championed the cause of impoverished farmers and settlers. Crockett also opposed Jackson on key issues, especially the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which he termed "a wicked and unjust measure" even though it cost him his reelection because most whites in Tennessee favored it.

What the song is doing is comparing the major players of Jacksonian Democracy (which historians assign a window of 1830-1850) and its opponents to the "Free Negro dandies." These dandies were seen by society as pretentious, crude men who lack any real knowledge or taste. They are simply beneath the dignity of the class they aspire to and nothing can be done to remedy that. Hence the comedy of the phrase, "O ole Zip **** he is a larned skoler" in the same sense as saying, "I'se a edjacated man, I is." Dixon was pointing out the Jacksonian era politicians as being no better and no less comical but the song is also a criticism of how honor is denied to the common white citizen. Dixon was saying, "I'm Zip ****, you're Zip ****, we are all Zip **** in this day and age."

And there are yet other versions of the song. This is partly because there was more than one Zip ****. Besides Dixon, there was Bob Farrell who was probably singing "Ole Zip ****" by 1833, a year before Dixon, George Nichols billed himself as Zip **** and a "Mr. Palmer" is mentioned as singing it at Richmond Hill Theatre in New York in March of 1834-the same year and month that Dixon is first cited to have sang it. We are most interested in Dixon because of the socio-political commentary within his songs. Dixon was himself of low birth from Richmond in 1801. At 15, his singing abilities landed him in a traveling circus. He achieved stardom almost overnight with his blackface act at the Bowery Theatre in 1829.









George Washigton Dixon.









Sheet music for Zip **** Song about 1835. It's written for piano and sounds far more stately than what would actually be heard at the theaters.

Dixon was not content to be merely "The American Melodist," "The Buffo Singer" or "Zip ****." He had other aspirations and moved to Boston to start up a series of muck-raking scandal sheets, squarely on the side of the working class, that earned him a great many enemies. He then moved to New York and continued his writing career there and, again, gained many enemies and even did stints in jail. But he never gave up the stage either. He continued to perform as Zip **** and even got into legitimate theatre. His muckraking efforts were squarely in the vein of charivari-accusing a person of some moral offense and inciting some type of retaliation among the readership against the offender. His opponents charged him with everything from petty theft to being a "ni-gger" or "mulatto." His trials garnered a huge amount of attention and newspaper readers avidly kept up with the latest courtroom dramas.

Even Dixon's own readership would be angered by some of the things he would print such as his antislavery stance and yet would turn up at his shows and listen to him as Zip **** leveling the same charges from the stage and cheer him on wildly. This seems to have a shamanistic connection: a shaman was regarded by his or her fellow tribespeople as an ordinary person until they donned the mask of the god and danced into an ecstatic frenzy. Then this person's utterances were regarded as the utterances of the god-not the person. Dixon's audiences had the same reaction to him. As the editor of a scandal sheet they hated him, insulted him, reviled him but, in the mask of Zip **** dancing ecstatically, he became the god whose utterances were received with good humor and applause.

Dixon later turned to long distance walking to raise money. He was known to walk long distances without rest or pause once even covering 30 miles in about five and a half hours. Everywhere he went, he was greeted by crowds. He was his own self-promotion machine and always managed to find a way to stay in the public eye. Yet, by 1861, he had so drifted out of the view of that eye that when he died that year, no major paper-remarkable considering his significant contributions to American culture-bothered to carry his obituary.





The Zip **** Song which we recognize today as "Turkey in the Straw."


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## Guest (Apr 13, 2016)

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was born in New York in 1808 and worked as a carpenter's apprentice as a lad. Rice, though, had a love for the theatre and began to perform in it on the side around the 1820s playing extraneous characters for which he received no billing and little pay. Later in the decade, Rice decided to go into show business full time and joined various theatre troupes. Rice showed a flare for comedy for which he began to get some amount of notice. During a three-year stint in Kentucky, Rice developed a liking for the music and dances of the Blacks in the area, most were likely slaves, and began to study them. Rice befriended them to the extent that he was able to observe their dances and talk and eat with them while studying everything about them. He thoroughly immersed himself in what it was to be Black to talk like them, perform their dance steps, sing their songs, joke like them, laugh like them. He was the Blackest White man in America.

Around mid-1830, Rice was performing in blackface as a character named Jim Crow. Exactly how he came up with his gig is not really known except apocryphally. One story is that Rice observed a Black, crippled stable hand dancing a strange, disjointed jig while singing a little song. Another, which may have more truth to it, is that Rice was taught or at least convinced to perform in blackface by a seven-year-old White boy named Sam Cowell. His father, Joe Cowell, was an Englishman performing in American theatre as a mainly comic actor. When Cowell and son heard "Coal Black Rose" being performed-perhaps by Dixon although others were doing it as well-young Sam decided he could perform that number in blackface. When he performed it onstage, claimed the elder Cowell, the audience rained the stage with money. Cowell also reported that Rice was a young and very unassuming man of rather a modest character and had no idea that the man had his own blackface act. This would indicate that Rice developed his character shortly after the Cowells departed the area and that the first city to see Rice perform as Jim Crow was, in fact, Louisville where it can be proven that he was living at the time and so this would put the emergence of Jim Crow at mid-1830. Certainly he was performing Jim Crow by September of that year because there is a handbill from that period still in existence advertising Rice as Jim Crow.

Rice, however, must have had an idea about performing as Jim Crow for some time because Rice did not invent Jim Crow. He must have learned about this character from the Blacks he had befriended. In the Yoruba culture of West Africa, their myths contain a crow that is something of a Trickster figure, that is, it accomplishes its ends by manipulating those around him. To haughty, highbrow types, he presented himself as an obsequious servant; to those with low self-esteem, he presented himself as an authority figure. Through skillful cunning and deceit, the Trickster figure gets what it wants from others by using their own natures against them. He is not always self-absorbed but might use his cunning to help others by tricking those who had no intentions of providing that help. The mythological figure that gives fire to man, for instance, is, in all cultures, the Trickster.

The Yoruban crow in their mythology is not only a Trickster but has the name of "Jim." When West Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves, the Trickster crow named Jim simply became "Jim Crow." These early slaves often consciously practiced Jim Crow by pretending to be dumb or lame to get out of work. Jim was both a popular slave name (think Huck Finn) as well as a popular minstrel name (Jim Crow, Dandy Jim, Jim Josey, etc.). When Whites banned certain forms of slave dance that involved crossing the feet or legs (seen as subversively anti-Christian), slaves developed dance steps that shuffled without crossing and called this dance "Jim Crow" possibly because it subverted the ban. It was this dance that Tom Rice observed and appropriated for his act. That would not likely happen on the sudden. So Rice must have had the idea of performing this dance onstage for some time and perhaps seeing Sam Cowell's blackface routine and hearing of the rewards of the performance convinced him to try it out..

We can further deduce that Rice's earliest performances were not particularly noteworthy. Nothing in the available evidence indicates that audiences were swept up by the song. It is not listed on any bills as a smash or a special feature but just as one song among several and neither as an opening nor closing number. So, we can deduce that Rice worked on it and probably got suggestions from other performers on how to spice it up. Very likely he demonstrated his act to his black friends and got advice from them as well.

We know, though, by 1831, that Jim Crow was garnering a lot of notice. Rice would "explode" onto the stage. As he pranced about, he would belt out his song, "Jump Jim Crow," in his falsetto voice singing in slave dialect. Throughout his number, he would punctuate the song with explosive moves, twirls and twists. His limbs seemed to move independently of one another in this very odd but entertaining disjointed fashion as though his arms and legs has extra joints on them. However, it was all very carefully choreographed and required a unique skill to pull off. Clearly, no one else was doing anything like it nor could they hope to. To finish off the number, Rice would "explode" off the stage to a wild ovation. By 1832, Rice was set to tour the East Coast where audiences crowded the theaters eager to see the act they had read so much about. They were not disappointed.










While "Jump Jim Crow" was a perennial favorite, he had other hits as "Clare de Kitchen" which we discussed earlier.

When Rice performed Jim Crow at the Bowery Theatre in New York, he became something of a superstar. From there, Rice toured extensively all over the U.S. and then went to the U.K. where he was also a huge hit. He even married an English woman while in London and then returned to the U.S. with his new wife in tow in 1837. He would return to the U.K. in 1839 and again 1842 and returned each time to tour the U.S.

The thing to keep in mind concerning "Jump Jim Crow" is that the song is, at its core, political and not just a dance tune. For example, one verse goes:

_I'm for union to a girl
An dis is a stubborn fact,
But if I marry and don't like it
I'll nullify de act
_
References to union and nullification are code words and only thinly disguised. In some of the printed versions of "Jump Jim Crow," we learn that he is against the U.S. Bank and its president, Nicholas Biddle who battled with Jackson over renewing the bank's charter but lost. Crow refers to him as "Ole Nick," a name for the Devil. Crow also criticizes Andrew Jackson's opponents in Congress.

To further illustrate just how political "Jump Jim Crow" actually was, the burning of the Ursaline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in August 1834 during an anti-Irish/Catholic riot led by Callithumpians was headed by a man whose followers asked him to sing "Jim Crow" according to the courtroom testimony of Asa Barker, one of the firemen who arrived to battle the blaze, at the man's trial. The prosecution later summarized the incident so: "When the convent is in flames, …Barker too at that time sees him by the engine; and then he was asked to sing Jim Crow, the Io Triumphe of the rioters…" So it can hardly be doubted that the song was primarily political and recognized as such by the Callithumpians and the attendees in the courtroom.

More importantly, we get a clue into who championed the song-working class, pro-Jackson, anti-Bank, anti-immigrant whites and primarily males. We remember too that George Washington Dixon used Callithumpian tactics and counted many friends and supporters among them. But wasn't he anti-Jackson and pro-Bank? Yes, he was. Between Zip **** and Jim Crow, we get two ends of a political spectrum. Both were working class and both were Callithumpian at the base but Dixon expressed what would become the radical Republican platform while Rice represented the Jacksonian Democracy. One blackface character was a Northern freedman dandy while the other was a shabby-dressed happy-go-lucky Southern slave. One was more about acting than music while the other cavorted in eye-popping dance steps of seeming infinite variety. One favored Northern Republicanism while the other favored Southern Democracy.

The Republican Party formed from the Whigs who began in 1832 as the Anti-Masonic Party after the murder of William Morgan in 1826 due to the way the Masons manipulated the justice system to favor the murderers. By 1833, the anti-Masonic issue was wearing thin and so the party banded with the National Republicans of John Quincy Adams (who called themselves "Anti-Jackson" and who were fracturing after Adams failed to get reelected in 1828) to form the Whig Party. They opposed Jacksonian Democracy and slavery (Jackson was everything they hated-a slave owner, a Mason and anti-Bank). To keep from losing the South, the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor as their presidential candidate. He was a slave owner which infuriated the hardcore Whigs (among them, a chap named Abraham Lincoln) and they split from the party forming the Republicans with Lincoln running as their second presidential candidate (John C. Fremont was the first). The radical republicans were a faction of the party led by Thaddeus Stevens who wanted slavery abolished, freedmen given the vote and, after the war, wanted harsh penalties against the Confederacy and opposed many of Lincoln's more lenient, moderate policies of reconciliation. That Dixon voiced much of the radical republican agenda before it existed is remarkable.

Many of Jackson's opponents referred to him as "Jackass" which he played along with until his democracy was represented as a jackass. In 1874, political cartoonist Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly used the jackass and the elephant as political symbols after a New York Herald hoax story about the animals in the Central Park Menagerie (a zoo) escaping and the images stuck.










I don't mean to get too far ahead of the topic at hand but there is so much history attached to minstrelsy that it is inexcusable to neglect explaining it so the reader can place events in context. To explain minstrelsy without understanding the politics of the time would be a pointless endeavor. We must, for example, recognize that the word "Callithumpian" was a general term and not one that represented a united party or organization-there was no cohesion and many Callithumpian groups were very opposed to one another's views.

Likewise, the same was true of minstrelsy. It appealed to the common man but the common folk were not united and so enjoyed minstrelsy for different reasons and interpreted it differently. To further confuse things, many whites opposed to what Jim Crow stood for nevertheless attended Rice's performances for the sheer enjoyment of it and the same goes for Dixon. Then again, some of the verses of Jim Crow criticize whites and slavery. While "Zip ****" and "Jim Crow" are political songs, they are not true social commentary but rather presented a loose assemblage of views found in the common people and verses were added to please the various factions of common folk rather than attempt to criticize or marginalize any. These songs, by their nature, are inclusive.

But what does the music itself tell us? If one listens to the clip of "Jump Jim Crow" that posted below, one can hear that there isn't much to it. It is rather simple. Rather anti-climactic to hear the
music after reading about the fame and cheering crowds. In fact, a British journalist wrote: "America has sent us a filthy abortion of a song, with neither talent nor humor." We would think the song must have been a catchy tune but instead hear something so simple that it is monotonous. What was it about the music that made audiences request encore after encore?






"Jump Jim Crow" is in the best tradition of the Callithumpians and mummers-a bunch of racket. There is some evidence that it derived from the Black slaves' corn-husker songs. Two teams would compete shucking corn for a prize-usually a feast put on by the master of the plantation in which the winning team goes first. These festivities were also very loud and occasionally violent. Here again, the Lord of Misrule rules. I have not yet explained what the Lord of Misrule is-he governs the Christmas celebration as it used to be when it descended from the Roman Saturnalia (December 17-23). During this time, slaves became the masters and masters became the slaves. This societal inversion was known as "misrule." In corn-husking, the master serves a fine dinner to the slaves and this often occurred on Christmas. Also, the each slave man was invited to the master's house where the master greeted him cheerily, gave him gifts to give to his kids (usually firecrackers-again something noisy), poured him a big snifter full of his best bonded whiskey (whiskey aged in a barrel as least four years), a big cigar, wished him a Merry Christmas and then guided him to a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars and invited him to plunge his hands in and take as many as he could carry. This ritual tended to humanize slave to master and master to slave which resulted in a better working relationship (once again, the enforcing of "good" behavior).









Old Christmas celebration in the U.K. which was a Lord of Misrule celebration. Note all the noise and racket-making.

In blackface minstrelsy, the entire show was presided over by the Lord of Misrule. The blackface character onstage manipulates his master to peals of laughter from the audience. With Zip **** he is a Black freedman who sings of being the "bery nex president" governing every White American. When the White performer dons blackface, he is not really imitating or mocking a Black man as we all too often assume today but rather he was making himself into the "Other" or the "Outsider" thumbing his nose at the upper class, the rulers, the authority that governed his life as completely as it governed those of the Blacks-one held in slavery, the other in wage slavery. He can no more belong to that class that he aspires to than the freedman dandy in his mismatched clothing of the landed aristocracy trying to speak the King's English with a slave barnyard dialect.

In mythology, great rackets and boisterous laughter represent great change. The reason Christmas was once such a loud, bawdy affair was because the year was ending and a new one coming. We still tend to get loud and drunk to ring in the New Year and even the phrase "ring in" signifies noise-the clanging and banging of the Callithumpian procession as it wound its way down the street. We celebrate the Fourth of July with great fireworks not to symbolize the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air but simply that a new nation had emerged, a new epoch was dawning and we celebrate it annually as a promise of eternal renewal even if by that we may be overreaching a bit.

The minstrels and the Callithumpians were following this same mythology, their noise a way of putting the aristocrats on notice-that changes were going to be made. The minstrel music was this great racket played on banjos and fiddles. It was meant to the oppose the fine, cultured music of the aristocrats with their opera and their symphony orchestras reeling off extravagant, richly textured chords. Minstrel music was stripped down, clumsy, crude, discordant and meant to grate on the ears of those accustomed to fine arts. Minstrel was, as punk was a century and a half later, anti-music.

By 1840, Tom Rice, still riding high in his popularity, began to experience stiffness in his joints and even in his voice but he kept dancing and singing. By 1847, his wife passed away. By the time the 1850s arrived, the first wave of minstrelsy was drawing to a close and a new one arose to take the reigns with even more boisterous noise than its predecessor. Rice still wore his blackface onstage his but stiffness had steadily increased until he could no longer dance although he still acted in legitimate theatre but even that became impossible eventually.

On September 19, 1860, Thomas Dartmouth Rice passed away. Although seven years junior to George Washington Dixon, Rice preceded him to the grave. He left behind no descendants, none of his children survived infancy. The exact cause of death was supposed by some to be liquor. Although Rice was a rich man at one point and wore extravagant clothing (making him a type of Zip ****), a New York Times memorial piece stated that Rice spent his fortune away in the saloons. Be that as it may, Many mourned his death as the newspapers eulogized him. The exact opposite of how Dixon was treated. And yet, we remember "The Zip **** Song" as "Turkey in the Straw" while "Jump Jim Crow" has faded completely from our memories. The only tribute to Rice's character after his death occurred in a most unflattering way: the South's brutal, dehumanizing segregation laws bore his name.


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## Guest (Apr 15, 2016)

But how did Blacks themselves regard minstrelsy? Were they offended, indifferent, favorable? I recently discussed minstrelsy with a young black man online who found it horribly demeaning as pretty much everybody does today. He was similarly offended at many of the songs of the ragtime era because they threw the word "ni-gger" around so casually. He pronounced the white performers in blackface to be "********." What I found baffling was that this young man is a rap fan and saw nothing wrong with rap's incessant use of "ni-gger" although rendered as "ni-gga." He fell back on the old "it's empowering when Blacks say it" although he couldn't point to a single instance where any Black person was so empowered. He pointed out that many Blacks decried blackface and the **** songs back then. Sure and many decry rap's use of the racist (and sexist) rhetoric today but does that mean it was the mood of the times?

My point was, was there any particular reason the average Black person in the age of blackface minstrelsy would have been particularly offended? The truth is, that in the North, when the fiddler played "Jump Jim Crow," White and Black children would dance to it whether the fiddler was White or Black.

There is a case on record, Barbadoes v. Bolcolm, from March of 1840, in which a six-year-old "pretty little pickaniny" named Rebecca Barbadoes, had her dress, bonnet and cape splattered with green paint while dancing in a paint store on Southack Street in Boston. The paint store, in order to drum up business, had employed the services of a fiddler (race not given). When the owner, Mr. Bolcolm tried to shoo the children away, he claimed that they got "saucy" with him. Somehow or other, Mr. Bolcolm either accidentally or otherwise splattered Ms. Barbadoes' clothing with green paint for which her parents demanded reimbursement of $20. A young boy named Thomas Brown (race not given) was called to the stand as a witness to the incident. He was asked what song the fiddler was playing that attracted all the children. He answered, "Jim Crow."

So, here is a case that demonstrates that Blacks of that period had no innate dislike of blackface minstrelsy and enjoyed the songs as much as whites. In case the reader is wondering, the court decided that Bolcolm was responsible for attracting the children in the first place but that he also had a right to be angry with their disruptive actions and so was ordered that he reimburse the Barbadoes family in the amount of $5.25 plus court costs. He might have fared better had not his lawyer embarrassed himself by claiming that had the family (who were obviously not slaves) taken their place on an auction block, the entire lot of them couldn't fetch $20 and that green went well with dark skin.










Among the Quakers in America in the 18th century, slavery was not only the peculiar institution but an intolerable one. They refused to stay silent and loudly condemned it. Because they ran the Yankee whale fishery in Nantucket and Massachusetts, they acquired great wealth (no one had learned how to drill for petroleum yet and so whales provided the only oil). Because of their money, the Quakers of New England turned New England into a bastion of antislavery practice. Region by region began to manumit its slaves resulting in a ballooning population of freedmen. New England was the vital link in the chain for the Underground Railroad which the Quakers financed with their whale money.

Some Quakers, still kept slaves and some moved out of New England to escape the stigma. Among these Quaker families were the Plummers who moved to Ohio in 1743. They brought their slaves with them, among them Thomas Snowden. When the head of the family, Samuel Plummer, died, the slaves were still not given their freedom until pressure was brought to bear upon them by the Society of Friends who ordered the Plummers to manumit their slaves or face expulsion from the Society. Thomas Snowden was given his freedom.

Thomas married a house servant named Ellen Cooper in Knox County, Ohio in 1834. He was 32 and she 17. They got a farm in Clinton, Ohio. Tom and Ellen were both illiterate but had seven children they sent to a local white school where they learned the three R's. Their names were (and in order of age): Sophia, Ben, Phebe, Martha, Lew, Elsie and Annie. In 1856, Thomas died and Ellen was hard put to pay the mortgage. So the family put on musical shows and charged admission. In their handbills, they explained that they were trying to save their farm from repossession (they did but lost two acres of land to the bank).

The Snowden Musical Family, as they advertised themselves, was quite talented. The oldest child, Sophia, and the youngest, Annie, played fiddles. Annie was also billed as the "Infant Violinist" as she was no more than 5 by 1860. The Snowden girls also appear to be the only female fiddlers in America at this time of any renown. Ben also played fiddle, Lew played banjo. Phebe was the band's dancer and may have played an instrument. The handbills also advertised the playing of guitar, dulcimer, flute, triangle and tambourine although we are not clear on which family members played these.

The Snowdens' way of starting off a show was to start playing on the way to the venue (they were known to even play in graveyards) to attract attention and followers. Each show netted them about $12 which was decent money back in the 1850s and 60s. The Snowdens performed many covers of tunes popular in that day and were especially fond of Stephen Foster songs. The audience (mostly white) might shout out numbers that the band didn't know and so they would improvise it showing a tentative connection to jazz.

The Snowdens were careful to keep things light and keep things clean. They advertised themselves as providing good, clean entertainment. They were abolitionists (after all, their father was a freedman) but downplayed their views while performing but they also avoided material that stereotyped Blacks. They garnered quite a reputation and name and so were often invited by whites of high social standing to spend the night in their homes while touring about.









A Snowden Family handbill.









Ben Snowden, fiddler.









Lew Snowden, banjoist.

The band had opportunities to hear, meet and play with other minstrel artists both black and white. Among them is Daniel Decatur Emmett. Besides living in the same area as the Snowdens, Emmett was multi-talented playing fiddle, fife & drum and banjo with equal proficiency. Emmett got his start in show business after leaving the army and joining the circus as a blackface minstrel.

In New York in 1843, Emmett performed in a group known as the Virginia Minstrels along with Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham and Frank Bower at the Chatham Theatre in New York. This was a turning point minstrelsy which I will explain in a bit.


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## Guest (Apr 15, 2016)

Emmett is most famous as the author and original performer of "Dixie" which he wrote in New York while a member of Bryant's Minstrels in 1859. While Emmett also performed "Old Dan Tucker" some don't believe he wrote it although the song is attributed to him as author.

There is some speculation that the Snowdens either wrote "Dixie" and gave it to Emmett or that they co-wrote it with him. This is not tenable for a number of reasons the main one being that "Dixie" clearly has antecedents among earlier Emmett songs written when the Snowden children were either very young or not even born yet. Secondly, the Snowdens avoided songs that used the slave dialect and so it is highly unlikely they would have written such a number. There is some speculation that Thomas Snowden may have actually co-wrote the song or one of its antecedents with Emmett and the evidence for this is not far-fetched. After all, Emmett lived close by the Snowdens in Knox County at Mt. Vernon and very likely came into contact with them even before their fame.










Some scholars pronounce "Dixie" as the most pro-slavery song in all of minstrelsy for it depicts a former-slave wistfully reminiscing about his youth on a Southern plantation:

_O, I wish I was in de land ob cotton
Old time dere is not forgotten
Look away, look away, look away
Dixieland_

The first thing to understand about the song is that it is the origin of the term "Dixie" as a synonym for the American South. No one is sure why although reference to the area below the Mason-Dixon line seems probable (some think it refers to a man named Dix known for his kindness to his slaves while others think it refers to Louisiana $10 bills called "Dix notes"). Regardless, the song became a huge hit in a very short time. Abraham Lincoln claimed it to be one of his favorite songs.

That Emmett would have written a pro-slavery song is hard to explain considering that he was anti-slavery. When the confederacy adopted his song as its anthem, he was infuriated and stated several times that he wished he had never written it. He joined the Union Army and wrote its fife & drum manual.

To understand why "Dixie" became an instant hit, we need to understand that 1843 represented a turning point in minstrelsy. A new crop of minstrel artists, Emmett among them, rose up about this time and changed minstrelsy from a realist portrayal of blacks to a representational one-that the blackface character was no longer meant to depict an actual Black man but rather the Whites themselves as children. The White audience of minstrelsy mainly came from the farms-many of them down South-and missed those wonderful, warm, summer days of their youth tending the fields, feeding the animals, fishing in the creek, sleeping under a tree. In the city, they were lucky to even see a tree much less a creek. So, in "Dixie" we are really hearing a working class White man reminiscing of his childhood on the farm and this is why the song resonated so well among urban Whites of the North as it did among rural Whites in the South.

So this was the milieu in which minstrelsy sprang up in the United States. The minstrel theme dealt with blackface characters being slaves on a Southern plantation. The lead blackface character was always trying to find ways to get out of work. When confronted by the Big Boss or the Mistress about his lack of being busy, he came up with ready excuses and was constantly outsmarting them (cartoons as Tom & Jerry and Pixie & Dixie were simply minstrel skits set to animation). On those occasions when the massa was not buying the stories or caught the slave red-handed in some deception, the slave character would be reprimanded in a gentle way-the way a parent reprimands a young child for doing wrong.

So the true meaning behind these minstrel skits is apparent-the white audience was not really watching a slave slyly manipulating massa but rather they were watching themselves as children manipulating their parents. Most of the audience were white people who had grown up on farms where they had chores they were forever trying to get out of. If caught, the parents might discipline them but not too harshly. The white audience was simply reliving the carefree days of its agrarian upbringing. Those long, hot, sunny, summer days playing hide and seek in the tall corn, trying to steal a kiss from the girl or boy who lived on the next farm, sitting contentedly in the cool of the evening while the grown-ups talked or sang after a fine feast of a home-cooked meal carefully prepared by the ladies in residence. Once they left the farms and come to the cities with their overcrowding, crime, long factory workdays, isolation, drunkenness, corruption and a cramped, ugly skyline of sooty buildings and hovels-all the carefree innocence was gone forever. Minstrelsy brought it back to them-for a little while.

The blackface enabled whites to hide behind a shield of anonymity of sooty complexion living the happy-go-lucky, carefree existences that they somehow convinced themselves that slaves lived. With faces blackened and banjos in hand, whites could drop their socially responsible positions and shed all the burdens that respectability and propriety are heaped with and let the Lord of Misrule have reign for a while until the show was over and everyone went back home sated enough to be ready to start the grind all over again in the morning.

Consequently, minstrelsy was not nearly as popular down South as it was up North. In fact, blackface minstrelsy had its beginnings in New York and Boston and spread to such places as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Peoria, Milwaukee, etc. This is not to say that minstrelsy was not popular in the South but the Southern planters discouraged it because it caused audiences to pull for the slave in putting one over on the Boss and the Bosses did not like that message propagating. Even in areas up North and in the Midwest where whites had run all the free Blacks out of the town, they still enjoyed their blackface minstrel shows and crowded the theaters to watch them, to laugh, cry, clap along and sing while convincing themselves that they had a much tougher life than the dark ones they held in servitude, whose lives they held in their hands, lives they could (and not infrequently did) snuff on a whim without the slightest fear of consequence.

The Snowdens remained on the minstrel circuit for some time and, by 1900, Lew and Ben were the only surviving members of the band and were still performing. Dan Emmett died in 1903 an old man while Ben and Lew got involved in racehorse ventures but were ultimately still musicians and would put on shows from a gable of their Knox County home until Ben's death in 1920. Neither left behind any children.

Found in the possession of Lew Snowden after his death in 1923 was a photograph of Dan Emmett along with the hand-written phrase: "Author of 'Dixie!'" Lew also retained a newspaper clipping about Emmett being the author of the song. I find it strange that Lew Snowden would hang onto these items that he obviously cherished if Emmett were taking credit for writing a Snowden song. What it does indicate is that Emmett and the Snowdens knew each other and quite well.

Of the original songs of the Snowdens, only one is confirmed to have survived called "We Are Goin to Leave Knox County" and is believed to have been written sometime around the Civil War era and definitely based on Stephen Foster's "Dear Lilly."

When Emmett collected a song he liked that he did not write, he did not take credit for it although perhaps there might be songs attributed to him by others. One such song is one Emmett had published under the title "Genuine Negro Jig." The title would indicate that Emmett did not write it but had encountered and published it in order to preserve it. In 2010, the Carolina Chocolate Drops recorded "Genuine Negro Jig" under the title "Snowden's Jig" as it is their belief that Emmett likely heard them perform it and so it may be another song of the Snowdens that is still preserved. I think they are right.























Dan Emmett taken late in life. A staunch abolitionist, Emmett was so furious that the Confederacy had adopted "Dixie" as its anthem that he joined the Union Army and wrote its fife and drum manual. When asked how he felt about the Confederacy appropriating his song, Emmett angrily replied, "I wish I'd wrote it!"


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## Guest (Apr 15, 2016)

By the 1870s, minstrelsy as it had been known was fading fast and entering yet a new phase: the cakewalk. As explained earlier, cakewalking was a dance that started on the Southern plantations in the days of slavery. It was also called chalkline-walking or a walk-around. On a certain day, usually Sundays, the slaves would dress up in their best finery-almost always hand-me-downs given to them by the master and his family-and form two columns. The columns were divided into male and female. On one end, a man from one column and a woman from the other would meet in the middle and strut down the between the lines of the dancers while everybody moved up and then the next couple came down the line and so on. This was done to the music of a fiddler, a banjoist or both. Other times, an ensemble would play on other instruments as cowbell, jug, bones, comb, harmonica, diddly-bow, kazoo, Jew's harp, washtub bass and the like.

The music was of the type that helped to spawn ragtime-a spry, jumpy melody and rhythm. The music and dancing would attract the master or his family and they would be given the honor of picking the best dancing couple. The winners would win an enormous cake-usually with coconut topping-but it was so huge that everybody would help them eat it. These dances generally lasted all night long especially during the winter months while the fields lay fallow.

While many of the instruments used for the cakewalk can be traced back to Africa-bones, banjo, kazoo, diddly-bow, washtub bass-cakewalking itself has no African antecedent. When native Africans witnessed the dance, none recognized it as anything akin to the dances they knew of.

Some statements of cakewalking celebrants tell us why:

"Us slaves watched white folks' parties where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march, with the ladies and gentlemen going different ways and then meeting again, arm in arm, and marching down the center together. Then we'd do it too, but we used to mock 'em every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better."

Ragtimer Shep Edmonds recalled in a 1950 interview:

"They did a take-off on the manners of the white folks in the 'big house', but their masters, who gathered around to watch the fun, missed the point. It's supposed to be that the custom of a prize started with the master giving a cake to the couple that did the proudest movement."


















This is perhaps the first published cakewalk from 1877-Harrigan's & Hart's "Walking for Dat Cake." It shows its ties to early minstrelsy as the celebrants are dancing in the kitchen (note the cupboards and chairs).









Cakewalker Doc Brown who danced on the streets for tips became famous after rag composer Charles L. Johnson saw him perform and composed a piece for him.





The very talented old-time pianist Morgan Siever, shown here performing "Doc Brown's Cakewalk" at age 11.

The joining of the cakewalk dance and the musical form also called cakewalk has been the source of some debate. Purists insist that cakewalks are not rags and yet some of the pieces pronounced cakewalks by some purists are pronounced rags by other purists and vice-versa. I really don't know the difference myself because I often classify some pieces as cakewalks only to find some music scholar classifying them as definite rags.

According to some sources, though, cakewalk pieces are more march oriented and, in fact, were often used by John Philip Sousa and also by his former sideman, Arthur Pryor.





"Frozen Bill Cakewalk" by the Arthur Pryor marching band.









Cakewalks were almost entirely a White phenomenon and some White composers specialized in them. The three tops cakewalk writers were Frederick Allen "Kerry" Mills, Abe Holzmann and J. Bodewalt Lampe. Not all cakewalks were written by White composers however. The first piece Joplin released after "Maple Leaf Rag" was a cakewalk he co-wrote with Arthur Marshall called "Swipsey Cakewalk" (although, predictably, some say it is a rag) published in 1901.


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## Guest (Apr 15, 2016)

The first song to have "rag" in the title is this 1896 piece by William Krell called "The Mississippi Rag" which ragtime scholar and pianist extraordinaire "Perfessor" Bill Edwards insists is actually a cakewalk. Admittedly, I have no idea who is correct. But he it is played by the incomparable Claude Bolling.


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## Guest (Apr 17, 2016)

Uncle John Scruggs from the 1928 movie "Times Ain't Like they Used to Be" doing an old minstrel song "Little Log Cabin in the Lane." The black banjo tradition had already largely died out by the 20s so this is an exceedingly rare glimpse into the past at the earliest form of ragtime and minstrelsy.


















1905--Minstrelsy still going strong.









Well into the ragtime era, the Zip ****-type image was still popular and easily absorbed into ragtime.









Image for an ad titled "Ragtime Dance Fashions."









Dolly Connolly was a very popular singer and performer who did some recording. She was the wife of Percy Wenrich, a white ragtime pioneer. Her most famous song, which she recorded in 1912, was "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee."


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## Guest (Apr 23, 2016)

Although, he preceded the ragtime era, Blind Tom Wiggins was a precursor of the black pianists who came to fame during the ragtime era. Tom was born a slave but blind and retarded. Unable to work, he became a playmate of the daughters of his master, General Bethune. The girls took piano lessons and would sit Tom at the piano and let him play with the keys. One night Bethune was in his bedroom getting ready to go to sleep when he heard beautiful piano music coming from the parlor. Which girl was playing at this time of the night and how did she get so good? Bethune went to the parlor and found, to his shock, Tom sitting at the piano playing classical music--entire pieces without benefit of sheet music (which he couldn't read anyway). Moreover, Tom couldn't walk but only crawl and yet somehow found his way to the piano on his own apparently driven by his desire to play it. Bethune discovered that Tom could play anything at all even after hearing it only once, even hours or days after hearing it only once.

Believing he had hit a jackpot, Bethune took Tom on tour as the young, blind Negro musical genius and theatres were packed. Although billed as hopelessly retarded there is speculation that Tom wasn't severely retarded. Those who met him on tour claimed he did not seem to them to be all that mentally impaired. He carried on conversations and was completely lucid and had a repartee with his audiences, bantering with them in witty fashion as he proceeded to play an entire 20-minute piece note-for-note at an audience member's request. Tom also played his own complex pieces. Tom also had a bit of a temper and didn't like being spoken down to neither for his mental condition nor his race and once punched and orchestra director in the jaw for speaking to him in an untoward fashion.

A true musical savant, Tom once flawlessly played back a 15-minute piece a man had only written a couple of days before believing that Tom's ability was a trick. Tom would even lay down under the piano and flawlessly play back requested pieces with his arms crossed.

Tom didn't care about money and had it sent to his parents for their use. Tom wanted only to be patted on the head by Bethune. The head pats were his only desired reward. And only Bethune's head pats were acceptable. When Bethune died in 1904, others tried to take his place but Tom would have none of it. He became withdrawn, sullen and moody and eventually stopped performing altogether although he could sometimes be heard playing in the apartment of Eliza Stutzbach, his longtime caretaker. He died less than 4 years after Bethune--most believe of a broken heart. It is most unfortunate that there are no recordings of Blind Tom.


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## Guest (Apr 24, 2016)

Aunt Jemima was originally a minstrel character played by a white man in blackface. On this old label, there is no attempt to depict the character as we know her today but rather she is depicted as a white man in blackface. The pancake mix was invented 1889 but made its nationwide debut at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 where it was immediately popular and has been ever since.









The Aunt Jemima-type figure was quite popular in that day. Whites found the dear ol' mammy stereotype quite endearing.









1886 advertisement. Ragtime was still unknown but its immediate forerunner, jig piano for Irish tap dancing, was quite popular.









Banjo was far more popular in the ragtime era than guitar especially among the ladies. The banjo was actually regarded as a lady's instrument although I know of no famous female players from that period.









Men's hats from the ragtime era.


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## Guest (Apr 24, 2016)

"Harlem Rag" is a very early piece written by Tom Turpin. It was published in 1897 and is known as the first rag written by a black man to contain "rag" in the title. The 300-lb Turpin, however, was know to be playing this rag at the Columbian Exposition four years earlier making it one of the first rags ever composed. Turpin also ran the Rosebud Cafe in St. Louis that featured a great deal of up-and-coming black ragtime talent including Joplin. "Harlem Rag" is one of my favorites--just a beautiful, sweet, little piece that really captures the spirit of ragtime.









Girl and what appears to be a phonograph. Once can see the recording cylinder containers on the table. I have a lot of these old cylinders. The term for a disc-player was a Victorola (or gramophone in England). Edison had patented his cylinder-player under the name of phonograph. This photo dates from about 1910 and the girl is probably not listening to ragtime--but you never know, young people loved it.









Most people don't think about "Hello Ma Baby" as a "**** song" as they were known back then but it was.





The great rag singer, Arthur Collins, does "Hello Ma Baby" on an 1899 cylinder. This must be one of the earliest recorded covers of this tune which being done throughout vaudeville.









A hand-tinted portrait of a lady from the Edwardian era, which followed the Victorian era starting in 1901 and lasting until 1910 when Edward VII died.









This is NOT to say, however, that tinting was the only way to produced a color photograph back then. Yes, they HAD color film as this photo from around 1910 demonstrates but the film was experimental and required a special camera and both were very expensive and only available to a limited number of professional photographers.









The Singer Building in New York as it looked in 1910. By then, electric lights were becoming the norm. The Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago used more electric lights at that time than were available anywhere in the world and Chicago employed them as streetlamps which cut down on the crime that plagued the city and would have endangered the fair-goers (who numbered in the millions by the time the fair closed some months later). Other cities began to follow the example of using electric lights and people started having their homes wired for electricity and new houses were built with it. Few cities in America were using gas lamps by 1910.


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## Guest (Apr 25, 2016)

La-Pas-Ma-La by Ernest Hogan was published in 1895 and is generally confirmed as the earliest published rag.









Ernest Hogan is often considered the true inventor of ragtime and he may have been. He wrote what are called "**** songs" which blackface white artists picked up on and it opened a new era of racism in American music. Hogan spent his later years apologizing for starting the **** song genre. Had he lived a little longer (died in 1909), he would have seen some of those stereotypes dying away.









Hogan in his Rastus character. He was the first black writer and performer to have his own show on Broadway and was one of the highest paid entertainers in the country and a 33rd degree Freemason.

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I won't embed the above image as it is quite racist and tasteless but this song was one of Hogan's most popular and is generally credited as being the first "**** song." These songs were written for black vaudeville but when white performers began to perform them in blackface, Hogan regretted having written them. The blackface performers defended their actions by saying their acts put ragtime on the map and, unfortunately, there is a great deal of truth in that.





An 1895 instrumental version of Hogan's above piece. The term "****" has long confusing history. It is often said to have first been used in print about 1848 but seems to have an antecedent from a 1767 play which has a black character called Raccoon who is affectionately called "Cooney." The term was also applied to American Indians and implied a peasant or outdoor laborer. The term was also applied to blackface minstrels such as Zip ****. By the ragtime era, **** referred to a type of black man that we now call a pimp--he was uneducated, violent and crude but put on airs of respectability by wearing suits except the jackets and pants were overly ostentatious and mismatched to indicate the man had no class.










https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/ca/cd/eb/cacdeb33240b27791aa964552ce54383.jpg
This depiction is too over-the-top to embed so be prepared to be offended.

However, the term was also used to describe a black person in general as this rather tasteless postcard suggests:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/3a/6c/86/3a6c8627f08953373b4dd5b8f537a410.jpg

In fact, "****" was not really considered a perjorative term until after WWI when whites were definitely using it as a term of racist contempt. In the 50s, however, Zora Neale Hurston was still using it in non-perjorative fashion. Also around 1950, Percy Wenrich was still alive and was interviewed by Rudi Blesh who was researching ragtime. Blesh said to Wenrich, "You are one of the pioneers of ragtime." Wenrich replied, "And a few ***** as Scott Joplin and Ernest Hogan." He has been attacked as a racist for this but an important point is lost. Wenrich was using "****" in non-perjorative fashion--he's an old school chap, after all--and he was giving credit to two black men that, by 1950, the entire country had utterly forgotten. No one knew who Joplin was at that time other than a few jazz musicians and what ragtimers were still alive and even they had no idea who Hogan was. Wenrich could have taken credit for himself but instead mentioned two men he thought it was important to remember and he deserves credit for that rather than condemnation because he was an old man not up on the political correctness of the day.

Back in 2001, I interviewed a 103-year-old white woman who lived across the street from me. I asked her if she remembered anything about ragtime (she was not an easy interview because she was very hard of hearing). She said she heard it everywhere she went as a girl but was not familiar with any of the artists and her parents didn't listen to it. I mentioned Joplin and she said she does remember his name but knew nothing about him. In fact, when I showed her his photo, she was surprised that he was black--something I knew since the mid 70s. I mentioned Hogan but she had never heard of him nor did she know who Percy Wenrich was. But it's rather eerie to talk to someone who was actually alive in that era. She said her mother was born in 1870 and her maternal grandmother, whom she was very close to, was born in 1838. It was strange to talk to someone who knew someone born that long ago.


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## Guest (Apr 26, 2016)

Ben Harney was a white ragtime pioneer who published "You Been a Good Ol' Wagon But You Done Broke Down" in 1895 just after Ernest Hogan' "La Pas Ma La." Harney was rumored in his day to have been a very light complexioned black man but he was a white man. The rumor may have arisen because Harney recorded himself singing the lyrics to "Wagon" and he could have passed for a black man:






Harney billed himself as the originator of ragtime although this is not tenable. He was nevertheless an early pioneer of the form. "Wagon" appears to be based on "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" and his collaborator, Johnny Biller, wrote down the music but did not how to capture the syncopation of the piece and so what we hear sounds a little stiff. Harney also appears to have originated scat singing as some of his vocal recordings have him imitating instruments.





Another early scat-singing venture was Gene Greene from this 1911 Victor recording, "King of the Bungaloos." One wonders if Louis Armstrong may have heard this as a lad and gotten ideas and same goes for the voice of Popeye. There is also a bit of improvisation going on here and so this could quality as quasi-jazz.














This 1912 recording by Eddie Morton is called "The Trolley Car Swing." Strangely, it prefigures the usage of the that term as used in jazz although we can be quite certain that "swing" was not being used in jazz at this time. There is also a version of this song by Elida Morris recorded that same year which I prefer to this one but I could locate that version anywhere.


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

It's interesting today to hear this music without a sense of it being in the past, but hearing it as the type of modern music which they would have heard it as. I get a sense it's a very modern sound, like when I see some of the photos of the attractive white women, it seems like just as modern as the newest hits today, and with the phonograph, which must have seemed so futuristic to the young teen sitting next to it, all a very "now" thing.


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## Guest (Apr 27, 2016)

regenmusic said:


> It's interesting today to hear this music without a sense of it being in the past, but hearing it as the type of modern music which they would have heard it as. I get a sense it's a very modern sound, like when I see some of the photos of the attractive white women, it seems like just as modern as the newest hits today, and with the phonograph, which must have seemed so futuristic to the young teen sitting next to it, all a very "now" thing.


Good! Excellent! You're doing what I want all readers of this thread to do: put yourself in that time-frame instead of looking back. One reason I'm posting images with no real connection to ragtime itself is to give the reader some atmosphere. And to remember other things we take for granted, i.e. women did not have the right to vote, tuberculosis and VD were incurable killers--their AIDS, no loudspeakers, no radio, movies were 20-minutes long with no soundtrackand an hour-long movie was an extravaganza until "Birth of a Nation" in 1915. Back then, you went to a nickelodeon parlor to buy a sundae or a soda. Inside was a pianola or big music box that played a large revolving disc with holes in it. You had to pump coins into these to hear the latest hit songs. I've even seen one that was a cylinder-player that sat behind glass. You dropped in a penny and it rolled down a chute, jumped a gap and fell into a mechanism that cued up the phonograph. You put on these earphones that were really essentially stethoscopes which you attached to the glass and you could hear the phonograph cylinder. The gap in the chute that I mentioned has a big horseshoe magnet that would cause a slug to instantly stick to it so it couldn't trigger the phonograph. Pennies being non-magnetic would jump the gap easily.

The nickelodeons were also pharmacies and drugstores and also showed movies and shorts. Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters became mega-stars via these shorts. The reason we tend to associate ragtime piano and corny melodramatic piano with silent movies is because the theatres hired a musician to play during the movie so it wouldn't be so uncomfortably silent. Americans were so accustomed to it that when soundtracks could finally be added to silent movies, they used the same music the hired musicians used to play. Obviously the movie didn't come with the piano score or they wouldn't have been silent.














"Beedle Um Bo" by Charles L. Johnson under the alias of Raymond Birch (1908).

Ragtime was to popular music what bluegrass was to old-time mountain music. A great departure from people were used to. I agree it would have sounded very modern to ears of that time. But it is hard to ignore the fact that ragtime was the first music that came to white America directly from blacks unlike minstrelsy that was filtered through whites for whites and that ragtime has a child-like, innocent quality. You can listen to it and imagine children dancing to it. Very different from blues or jazz which are very sensuous forms of music. Ragtime is sexually non-threatening. It was meant to put white men at ease as if to say, "Relax, dance, have a ball--we're not here to steal your women."





"The Smiler" by Percy Wenrich (1907)





Trilby Rag by Carey Morgan (1915)


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## Guest (Apr 29, 2016)

Nice explanation of ragtime. I touched on some of this stuff earlier but without audio examples, it's hard to get the point across. This does it quite nicely. Some of the techniques he shows you will probably make you say, "Oh! So THAT'S what that is!"









1900 piano.

There are a lot of modern ragtimers. One of the best is Martin Spitznagel who demonstrates here all the different styles that can be employed to play "Hello Ma Baby." the amount of talent and musical mastery it takes to do something like this is well beyond anything I'll ever possess so enjoy:














From 1912. The straw hats were called "boaters" because they were worn by the gondola pilots of Venice. They were extremely popular in the US and Britain from the 1890s to the 1920s.





"A Bag of Rags", a two-step from 1912. What's excellent about the ragtime clips put up by my friends RagtimeDorianHenry is that you can see the sheet music scroll by and you see the same thing the man in the first clip in this post talked about--how the right hand notes kind of straddle the left hand notes putting odd accents on the off-beat to make the time sound jumpy.

What is a two-step? It's a dance. It's the very basis of white people dancing. Black people dancing is way more complicated. If you didn't grow up dancing it, you'll probably never learn it. Brazilian dance is the same--very, very complicated and everybody starts as soon as they can stand upright. But even so, the two-step is implicit in these more complicated styles, it's simply greatly embellished. Basically, you count "one&two&three&" while you lift your foot (left for men, right for women) and bring it down on "one" and then the other foot for "&" and then lift the starting foot and bring it down "2&" and then the other foot on "3&". These last two steps are twice the duration of the first two. Let the bold numbers represent when each foot comes down and it counts like this: *1&**2*&*3*&

You can feel that rhythm in the clip above. But ragtime adds a bit more drama because as the "quick-quick slow slow" beats play through twice, the individual notes of the melody sound disjointed as they fall around the beats instead of on them. This had to blow people's minds in 1912! It's as though the two-step was being undermined!














If you really want to see some crazy dance, here is Ned Haverly. Ned was the grandson of J.H. Haverly who ran the United Mastodon Minstrels in the 19th century. One of the biggest minstrel acts around so Ned learned from the best.


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## Guest (Apr 29, 2016)

Ragtime form is quite different from modern pop format. Generally today, we tend to write a kind AABA song--two verses, a chorus or refrain, followed by a third or one of the first two repeated and then the end. Usually there is an instrumental and/or a bridge in there somewhere. But the basic theme repeats throughout and never strays far from it for very long.

Ragtime is different and composed of various strains. The strains are related but they are not much like each other. Sometimes a strain may repeat later in the piece but it doesn't have to. This made collaboration much easier. If I write two strains and you write two independent of me and neither of us can finish our respective pieces, we can combine them to make a nice ragtime song. In 1907, Joplin heard that his old friend, Louis Chauvin, was dying in Chicago of syphilis (a disease for which there was no cure back then and which would kill Joplin within ten years). Chauvin was black and Mexican and an expert musician, singer and dancer. His talent was prodigious. He never wrote anything down, though, because he never learned to read music. There were a couple of strains that he used to play that Joplin loved and he was hoping to work with Chauvin to get these strains down before the man passed. He went to Chicago and found Chauvin in a sporting house. Together, they began to work on a piece combining the strains of Chauvin with Joplin's. The result was "Heliotrope Bouquet" perhaps the most etheric piece to come out of the ragtime era.









Louis Chauvin





Reginald Robinson's version of the piece is my favorite even though he takes some of the syncopation out of it. But the format here is [Intro] [A] [A] *  [Intro] [C] [C] [D] [D] [end]. The intro and strains A and B are Chauvin's. Joplin arranged the piece and had Chauvin's intro repeat again before the piece launches into his own two strains. Ragtime generally uses four strains. And since each strain generally repeats in ragtime, we can say that each loop is a half-strain and shorten the scheme to [Intro] [A]  [Intro] [C] [D] [end].

In 1908, Louis Chauvin died at the ripe old age of 25.








*


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## Guest (Apr 29, 2016)

In "Mapleleaf Rag" (1899) we hear very different strains at work each one so distinctive that separate pieces could be written from each. Jelly Roll Morton called it "the perfect rag" and usually never praised anyone's music that way other than his own. "Mapleleaf" was written several years before its publication. We know he had the full piece by 1897 because he played it for musical colleagues then but couldn't find a publisher and we know he was playing at least parts of it as early as 1894 and may have been playing parts of it at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. He told his closest associates that it would make him "King of the Ragtimers" which it did. Although a huge seller, it wasn't the biggest-selling piece of ragtime during that era. Arthur Collins recorded a cylinder called "The Preacher and the Bear" in 1905 that sold two million copies--a completely extraordinary figure for a time when a few thousand copies was considered a major seller. Mapleleaf's sales were almost entirely dependent on sheet music as there were no recordings of it but only piano rolls and few people had player-pianos in their homes. It didn't sell a million copies until about 1915 or so.

But what one learns to do after listening to Joplin a lot, as I have, is to hear "Mapleleaf" in other pieces. Joplin had made such a template from "Mapleleaf" that he used it over and over again. While some may call this uninspiring, it actually takes a good creative mind to create entirely different pieces from the same template that do not sound like one another. For instance, listen to "Gladiolus Rag" and here the same scheme of strains and each strain rises and falss, starts and stops, the same way as "Mapleleaf" and yet is very different from "Mapleleaf":






And brilliant piece that follows Mapleleaf's scheme is Cascades:






"Sugar Cane Rag" is another:


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## Guest (Apr 29, 2016)

But before people start thinking that Joplin couldn't write in anything but the same format over and over again, listen to the brillliance of "Pine Apple Rag":






Or "Wall Street Rag":






Joplin's "Sarah Dear" was based on old riverboat melody played up and down the Mississippi that was borrowed in ragtime such as this piece and "Zizzy Ze Zum Zum" of 1898, recorded by Arthur Collins and John Terrell to name a couple. It made its way into jazz through Buddy Bolden as probably his signature song (sometimes called "Funky Butt") and which Jelly Roll Morton recorded (with slightly more sanitized lyrics) as "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say." I suppose "Elite Syncopations" could qualify as another variation of this old song but also borrows from "Mapleleaf."


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## Guest (May 6, 2016)

Charles L. Johnson was a great white rag writer who, like many whites, specialized in light rags. These rags were fairly straight forward and have whimsical quality and innocence. One might call them happy-go-lucky rags because that was how white society perceived blacks lived. The rags were favored by whites for that reason, they saw them as unspoiled black compositions that reflected their simple, unsophisticated, childishly optimistic way of looking at life.

Ironically, black composers were creating rags of great complexity by incorporating classical music into the ragtime form. One of the Joplin's black students was Scott Hayden who showed such promise that Joplin helped him develop his musical ideas into beautiful, genteel rags--heavy rags, as they are known. Unfortunately, Hayden would die at an early age before really coming into his own.





























James Scott's "Ragtime Betty" is another beautiful heavy rag written by probably the greatest rag writer ever. Joplin gets the most recognition but Scott was the most versatile and innovative.















Unlike most of the Joplin students, Scott sprang up a fully developed pianist and writer and did not require Joplin to co-write or arrange any of his compositions. He had been publishing his own pieces since he was a teen and had an excellent ear for composition.


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## Guest (May 7, 2016)

James Scott. In the previous post I inserted a photo of a man standing next to a banjo between two clips of Scott's rags. Upon re-reading it, I realized people might think that was James Scott. It is not. That's Horace Weston, a great minstrel performer of that era who is all but forgotten today.









I'm no prude or anything but there's just something about women dressed like this that I find quite appealing. Of course, I'm one to talk as I rarely dress in anything but jeans and t-shirt. Although I do wear fedoras because I like to have something on my head outdoors but ballcaps and knitcaps don't do it for me. I have a cool fedora that deliberately looks beat-up that goes well with informal dress. I'm also quite fond of pocket watches do not wear any other type of timepiece. When I'm gigging or doing a recital somewhere I will dress to the nines because such musical endeavors of the jazz or classical type require the proper showing of respect in terms of appropriate apparel.



























Irish gents from 1903.


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## Guest (May 7, 2016)

Alfred Vanderbilt in 1907. He would die 5 years later when the Titanic sank.














Joseph F. Lamb was one of the very few white composers who could write and play heavy rags. He was so good that the black ragtimers assumed he was black. Joplin knew better because it was he who got Lamb signed up with the Stark Publishing house after Lamb played him some of his rags.





This was the first rag that Lamb played for Joplin. When Lamb finished the piece, Joplin clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Now _that_ is a regular Negro rag!" Lamb took that as the greatest complimented he could hoped to receive from Joplin whom admired greatly.









St. Paul, MN, 1905.





One of the Joplin's lesser known pieces--a waltz rather than a rag but with a rag sensibility. It is unfortunate that Joplin is not better known for his waltzes which stretch the boundaries of what constitutes a waltz.









Consuelo Vanderbilt, 1902.


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## Guest (May 8, 2016)

There were a huge number of female rag composers: Mamie Gunn, Euday Bowman, Hattie Nevada, Irene Cozad, Elsie Janis, Hanna Rion, Irene Giblin, Florence Wood, Mary Walsh, Margaret Woodin, Charlotte Blake, Bessie Powell, Sadie Koninsky, Emma Harte, Myrtle Hoy, Abbie Ford, Annie Ford McKnight, Effie Kamman, Agnes Melville, Dorothy Ingersoll Wahl, May Aufderheide, Mabel McKinley, Florence Wilson, Marian Davis, Cora Salisbury, Anna Hughes Carpenter, Julia Niebergall, Anita Owen, Winnifred Greenwood, Hortensia Weisman, Florence McPherran, Hattie Starr, Gladys Yelvington, May Summerbelle, Geraldine Dobyns, Maude Gilmore, Laura Schick King, Irene Franklin, Nellie Stokes, Camilla Shiele, Gertrude Colby, the Beaumont Sisters, Molly King, Pauline Story, Libbie Erickson, Luella Moore, Marie Louka, Gwendolyn Stevenson, Florence Cook, Alma Saunders, Mattie Harlburgess, Ruth Orndorff, Helen Eaton, Zema Randale, Mae Bell, May Irwin, Mamie Williams, Henrietta Belcher, Mattie Thompson and so on.

The ragtime era was, in fact, largely female driven. Even rags that bore male names as composers were frequently written by women whose publishers feared wouldn't sell well if they public knew they were female writers. Some women, however, as Elsie Janis, were able to build careers as both writers and performers. But such ladies were a rarity. Truly unfortunate since they proved themselves every bit the equal of men and, frankly, were better than most of them. I certainly find myself constantly listening the rags written by ladies not for that reason but simply because I love the way they sound.














Irene Cozad apparently hailed from Kansas City. She is only known to have published a couple of rags. No one knows how the abrupt end of her composing career came about or if she was ever a real person but perhaps a composer using a pseudonym. She may have died suddenly or simply gotten married and gave up her music career. No one knows. What we do know is that "Eating Time Rag" is a perfectly lovely piece.





Julia Niebergall was more prolific than Cozad and enjoyed a long and fruitful career. Her pieces are lovely light rags that sat well with the public.





May Aufderheide also enjoyed a good, prolific career. "Dusty Rag" is one of her better known pieces and quite excellent.














Euday L. Bowman's "12th Street Rag" is a brilliant piece that truly captures what ragtime was about and helped to build a bridge to jazz. In fact, the early jazzers continually borrowed pieces of this rag as filler for their numbers indicating that it certainly was a piece they listened to often and were quite familiar with.














Sadie Koninsky had "Eli Green's Cakewalk" published in 1898. What a beautiful piece this is! She clearly had an excellent ear for harmony.


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## Guest (May 14, 2016)

In the 50s, the lower class youths of London started to purchase the type of clothing unavailable to them during the war. They settled on the clothing worn during the reign of Edward VII (1901-1910) which they saw as the last great days of the Empire. They were rough & tumble lads and bints who got into gang rumbles. Some carried clubs called coshes (shades of "A Clockwork Orange"). The violence reached such proportions that the posh clothing became associated with it and businessmen and politicians stopped wearing it altogether. A newspaperman covering the exploits of the cosh boys, as they were known, began to refer to them as teddy boys--after Edward VII who was known among his loyal subjects as King Teddy. The name stuck and they have been called teddies or teds ever since.














The teds wore drapecoats with four velvet-trimmed pockets and lapels, vests, ties (although slim jim ties were preferred), skinny pants called "drainpipes", crepe/velvet shoes called "beetle-crushers" and collared dress shirts (they preferred B-collar shirts which was an invention of the American singer and trumpeter, Billy Eckstine, who made the collars loose and billowy so that trumpeters could breathe easier after their necks expanded while playing--they became a sensation after Miles Davis began wearing them). Strangely, this style of dress was quite popular during the war among the gay male set and the beetle-crusher shoe was virtually the gay man's invention. I have talked to teds who admit this openly.














Teds became allied to a group called the rockers who wore leather and drove motorcycles. They liked the same music--American rock n roll, skiffle and rockabilly. Many teds bought bikes and wore leather to rumble in so their expensive clothing wouldn't get torn; likewise, many rockers bought the posh teddy clothes to get into the pubs that didn't allow leather. Some teds, though, took to wearing leather full-time as these 4 anonymous Liverpudlian teddy lads demonstrate here.









REAL teddy boys!














So we can see that the ragtime era was highly influential sometimes in surprising ways.


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## Guest (May 14, 2016)

Speaking of the women of ragtime, I would be remiss to fail to mention Irene Franklin, quite famous at the time. She wrote a spate of "redhead" rags that went over well with the public due, in no small part, to her good looks. That's her posing for her own cover. The cowriter, Burt Green, was Irene's hubby. He was no newcomer to ragtime but was actually one its pioneers and co-founded the original circle of West Coast ragtimers which formed in the mid-1890s. He was also married to a famous dancer then.

By 1905, the marriage was on the rocks and the West Coast circle had broken up and dispersed. Green felt he needed to start anew and so obtained a divorce and ran into the young, pretty Irene Franklin who could compose, sing and compose. Green, madly in love and realizing she was just the thing to revitalize both his career and love life, lost no time in isolating her from other suitors and married her. He co-wrote all her material. It was a good move on his part, they hit it big.










Irene sings on this 1911 cylinder.





Another cylinder of a very famous piece then, written by Irene and Burt. Wonderful scenes of the ragtime era.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

I remember being a teddy boy  it didn't last long as they became knife carrying trouble makers, but the numbers in the videos you have posted took me back to the first band I played with it was in the UK and was a traditional jazz band, I have never lost my fondness for this type of music, oh happy days! Thanks Victor.


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## Guest (May 15, 2016)

Gangs in general are bad news. Always somebody has to start something. Someone always has push the envelope to prove something. But, anyway, I love the ragtime and early jass. A volatile but fecund period of American history. The point at which we became a nation although some things were different. America had no national anthem then and virtually everybody assumed it to be "My Country 'Tis of Thee." "The Star-Spangled Banner" wasn't adopted as the official anthem until the 30s, I believe.

Women's rights were not on par with men--with white men anyway. White men didn't go through this for trying to vote:










I think that photo was taken in the UK but it was the same in the US. And yet more women were writing and performing ragtime than in any genre of music since. That era saw horse-drawn carriages become automobiles and gas lanterns become electric lights. Radio was just getting started. Sitting Bull and Geronimo were still alive. In fact, Sitting Bull adopted Annie Oakley and named her "Little Sure Shot" which she was very proud of.


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## Guest (May 15, 2016)

Footage of San Francisco 1906 just a month or so before the earthquake. The train the camera is mounted on is moving down Market Street towards the Ferry Bldg. If you look at the same view taken just days after the quake, you'll be shocked at the extent of the damage. Many of the people you see in this clip will be dead in a short while.









Market Street and the Ferry Building after the earthquake.









The totality of the disaster.





1914 cartoon "Gertie the Dinosaur" by Winsor McCay who also drew the surrealist comic strips of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" and "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend" which are VERY trippy! This cartoon was interactive and shown before audiences. Instead of the cue cards we see, McCay actually spoke to Gertie who seemed to hear and obey. Big deal, you think, but in 1914 this was like magic! No one had ever seen anything like this before. At the end, McCay walks behind the screen and suddenly he's riding on Gertie's tail! WHAT THE ???? This blew people's minds back then! It freaked them out because most people had no idea how cartoons worked and it really spooked them and many thought there was some kind of sorcery going on. We laugh at it today, but it was because of people as McCay that we even have a cartoon industry. This is sometimes called the first cartoon which it is not but it _was_ the first interactive cartoon and perhaps still is the only one. McCay was _way_ ahead of his time. The music chosen here sounds very much like one of the clips I posted here. Can you guess which one?


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

This thread has wonderful pictures and I salute you all for them :tiphat:


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Victor Redseal said:


> So blackness as seen by white audiences in America as something "other" and something "low." Black could never assimilate and so would always be on the outside. This, again, harks back to the subconscious idea that black represents the unknown, the unknowable, the shadow, the devil.
> 
> In Holland, they celebrate Christmas on December 6 as Saint Nicholas Day. The Dutch depict Nicholas as a bishop who ride a white horse. Running or walking alongside Nicholas is a fellow they call Zwarte Piet or Black Pete. He usually carries a sack of switches to beat the bad children with while Nicholas or Sinterklaas hands out the gifts to the good children. Pete is the shadow twin of Santa, his dark side. He's lower than Sinterklaas and so runs alongside him instead on the horse with Nicholas.
> 
> ...


Nice thread! I like it when someone digs deeper. I haven't read all of it up till now because when I arrived at the part quoted above, as a Dutchman, I have to react. I don't know what your sources are and I don't pretend I own the truth on this but nevertheless some parts need correction or more context.

First: Dutch don't celebrate Christmas on the 6th of December, we do that on the 25th and 26th of December. In the way we celebrate Christmas there is no part for the man with the white beard (except maybe as an import of the American Santa Claus who is a different character). Sinterklaas is a separate thing in Europe. In Holland we celebrate that on the 5th of december (but it starts already half November). In Belgium it's the 6th of December. The association between the two is probably based on the similarity in the name (Sante Claus is a derivative of Saint Nicholas/Sinterklaas) and the fact that in both cases people give each other presents.

The Sinterklaas-feast is very important folkore in the Netherlands that originates from the 14th Century. It's celebrated nation-wide till today. It is a family feast based on legends and has changed continuously over time in every aspect and also has big regional differences. The way you describe Sinterklaas is typical for the period between 1850 and 1970. Before 1850 there was no Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) involved in the feast. So Zwarte Piet is not an element of subconscious folkore. 
Around the 1850's the cultural climate in Holland was extremely bourgeois and middle class oriented. In all culture a lot of emphasis was placed on decency, good behavior, education of children, punishment, etc. Parents were expected to raise their children according to these standards. In this vein Zwarte Piet punishing bad children with switches and a few other new elements to the Sinterklaas folkore were introduced by a bourgeois author called Schenkman in 1850. His ideas were adopted and became part of the folkore. So the occurence of Zwarte Piet is to be explained as a deliberate and successful attempt to change folkore by the establishment of the day. In my opinion it is an expression of 19th century colonialist thinking of the Dutch establishment (that was playing a big role in slave trade).

The depiction of Zwarte Piet as Moorish has in my opinion nothing to do with not being able to consciously explain blackness. A Moorish element was already there in the folkore around Sinterklaas because Saint Nicholas was a Turkish/Italian/Spanish (= somewhat Moorish) saint in the legend. I think the Moorish origins in the legend were just given a 19h century bourgeois (colonialist) interpretation whereby the Moors became black. I also think this blackness is not used to demonstrate the evilness of Zwarte Piet. It is merely used in the sense of fear for the unknown and possible punishment that awaits you as a child when you not behave according to what present society asks of you.


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## Guest (May 15, 2016)

Casebearer said:


> Nice thread! I like it when someone digs deeper. I haven't read all of it up till now because when I arrived at the part quoted above, as a Dutchman, I have to react. I don't know what your sources are and I don't pretend I own the truth on this but nevertheless some parts need correction or more context.
> 
> First: Dutch don't celebrate Christmas on the 6th of December, we do that on the 25th and 26th of December. In the way we celebrate Christmas there is no part for the man with the white beard (except maybe as an import of the American Santa Claus who is a different character). Sinterklaas is a separate thing in Europe. In Holland we celebrate that on the 5th of december (but it starts already half November). In Belgium it's the 6th of December. The association between the two is probably based on the similarity in the name (Sante Claus is a derivative of Saint Nicholas/Sinterklaas) and the fact that in both cases people give each other presents.
> 
> The Sinterklaas-feast is very important folkore in the Netherlands that originates from the 14th Century. It's celebrated nation-wide till today. It is a family feast based on legends and has changed continuously over time in every aspect and also has big regional differences. The way you describe Sinterklaas is typical for the period between 1850 and 1970.


Thanks for that. It's hard to find good, detailed explanations and the writers are not Dutch in any case so I have to take what they say at face value.



> Before 1850 there was no Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) involved in the feast. So Zwarte Piet is not an element of subconscious folkore.


Oh, he is. You're isolating one thing from everything else and then saying it has no antecedents. Everything has antecedents including Zwarte Piet.



> Around the 1850's the cultural climate in Holland was extremely bourgeois and middle class oriented. In all culture a lot of emphasis was placed on decency, good behavior, education of children, punishment, etc. Parents were expected to raise their children according to these standards. In this vein Zwarte Piet punishing bad children with switches and a few other new elements to the Sinterklaas folkore were introduced by a bourgeois author called Schenkman in 1850. His ideas were adopted and became part of the folkore. So the occurence of Zwarte Piet is to be explained as a deliberate and successful attempt to change folkore by the establishment of the day. In my opinion it is an expression of 19th century colonialist thinking of the Dutch establishment (that was playing a big role in slave trade).


If you read further into my thread, I cover this--the enforcing of the societal or communal standards of behavior. This was done with other types of Santa Claus figures such Pelznickel--Nicholas the Punisher.









A Pelznickel image. Not exactly a friendly looking chap.

This kind if enforcer has been around for centuries if not millennia probably going back to when all the humans on the planet were still tribal hunter-gatherers.










After the advent of agriculture, it was even more important because not sticking to schedules could mean famine. So there was always a punisher of bad deeds. Some other early Santa images:



















Over time and different locales, Santa's evil side was stripped away to become a separate entity. In the US, early Christmases were celebrated with the Lord of Misrule where society is inverted and slave became master and master became slave. Eventually, the dark side of Santa was relegated to the last day of October--the evening before All-Saints Day or All-Hallow's Even or All-Hallow's E'en which we in the US now know as Halloween. This was an even older Druid holiday that marked the setting of the Pleiades which marked the end of the growing season and the onset of winter--the dark months which steal the virgin of the Spring. That is the origin of the blackface character, the dark villain. The Dutch turned him into a Moor for the same reason that Americans turned him into a dancing slave--it was what we were familiar with consciously because we're not really familiar with the unconscious workings of our minds.



> The depiction of Zwarte Piet as Moorish has in my opinion nothing to do with not being able to consciously explain blackness. A Moorish element was already there in the folkore around Sinterklaas because Saint Nicholas was a Turkish/Italian/Spanish (= somewhat Moorish) saint in the legend. I think the Moorish origins in the legend were just given a 19h century bourgeois (colonialist) interpretation whereby the Moors became black. I also think this blackness is not used to demonstrate the evilness of Zwarte Piet. It is merely used in the sense of fear for the unknown and possible punishment that awaits you as a child when you not behave according to what present society asks of you.


Well, you've just given an excellent explanation how the conscious mind creates a narrative to explain the mind's unconscious workings. The Dutch turned him into a Moor because that is what they are familiar with. If what I am saying is garbage, then explain Krampus.










Here is another evil assistant to Nicholas who is clearly a devil and not a Moor. He even carries a type of pitchfork. and it all harks back to agriculture--Nicholas/Santa is the sunny day and the pleasant weather that helps the crops grow and Pete/Krampus is the ravaging winter and the howling storm that destroys crops. One is a rewarder, one is a punisher. Ultimately, they are the same thing--the weather passing through the cycle of the seasons and marked by the movements of the celestial bodies.

As time goes on, however, we lose all these connections but the rituals remain but we can't remember what they are for so, once again, we create a narrative to explain it.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Victor Redseal said:


> Oh, he is. You're isolating one thing from everything else and then saying it has no antecedents. Everything has antecedents including Zwarte Piet.


All throughout my reply I was talking about *the Sinterklaas feast in The Netherlands and Belgium only* because that's all I know about. So when I said Zwarte Piet is not an element of subconscious folkore I meant the role of Zwarte Piet in the Dutch Sinterklaas feast specifically. I should have been more precise on that probably.

In your post #11 you seem to imply, if I'm right, that Zwarte Piet is a traditional folklore element of the Dutch Sinterklaas legend. This is not the case. There are no Dutch and Belgian sources prior to 1850 in which Sinterklaas had a servant (black or white), he was on his own. His role *in the Sinterklaas feast* does not derive from popular legend, it was construed in 1850 by one person, the Dutch schoolteacher and author Jan Schenkman, and later became part of tradition.

You're right when you say Zwarte Piet was an element of folklore. This was also the case in The Netherlands. There are some sources on Dutch folklore that mention a black man, sometimes named Zwarte Piet, a bogeyman that would come to take naughty children away. But prior to 1850 this Zwarte Piet had no connection to Sinterklaas. So what Jan Schenkman did was introduce a then popular folklore figure into the Sinterklaas narrative.

So 'Zwarte Piet' is a traditional folklore element but he is not a traditional folkore element in the Dutch Sinterklaas legend (in the Netherlands at least). It was introduced from 'high culture' into popular culture over here.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Victor Redseal said:


> The Dutch turned him into a Moor for the same reason that Americans turned him into a dancing slave--it was what we were familiar with consciously because we're not really familiar with the unconscious workings of our minds.
> 
> Well, you've just given an excellent explanation how the conscious mind creates a narrative to explain the mind's unconscious workings. The Dutch turned him into a Moor because that is what they are familiar with. If what I am saying is garbage, then explain Krampus.


I'm not here to argue or anything like that. I just wanted to make a contribution to an already interesting and worthwhile thread on the one element I know something about. And I'm certainly not saying that what you're writing is garbage which of course doesn't mean that there is no room for improvement in some of the details.

In general I agree with you that the subconsciousness plays a big part in folklore, that over time rituals remain we don't know the origins of and that we invent new narratives to explain them to ourselves. But that doesn't mean that it's all folklore and subconsciousness. High culture and societal powers have always done their bit to adjust and influence popular culture to suit their means. The way folklore and popular traditions present themselves to us today is a mixture of folklore origins and influences from high culture that have changed the tradition continuously in their interaction. I think over time we not only lose the connection to the folklore origins, we forget about high culture influences in the past just as well. The Dutch Sinterklaas feast illustrates that very well because we have had a fierce country-wide debate on it the last couple of years for it being racist or not. The Dutch that want to keep the Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet-tradition 'as it always was', forget that it has changed continuously over the centuries and they in fact defend a specific version of the tradition strongly influenced by 19th century nationalist and conservatist bourgeois morals.

On the quote above: 
I don't know what your sources are on the Dutch turning Black Pete into a Moor "because that is what we were familiar with" but it doesn't convince me. I think around 1850 we were more familiar with black men through slave trade than with Moors (who were part of history long gone by). It also were not "The Dutch" that turned Zwarte Piet into a Moor but the author Jan Schenkman.

I have no sources myself but a different explanation seems more probable. To me the figure of Zwarte Piet as a Black man dressed in Moorish style makes perfect sense from the point of view of the author. Although Sinterklaas in fact is from Turkey, in the Dutch tradition Sinterklaas is seen as a very old Spanish bishop (I'll skip the explanation for that). Sinterklaas is also hundreds of years old, from the time Spain was under Arab (Moorish) rule. So Schenkman combined the idea of a very old Spanish (Moorish) bishop with servants ("Knechten") that were of course dressed in Moorish style because they lived in Spain with the popular figure of Zwarte Piet. Out came a Black man dressed Moorish.

I feel no urge to explain Krampus because he's no part of our tradition in any way, I never heard of him. He's foreign to our tradition (he's from Germany). I think you should maybe be a bit more aware that there is not one Nicholas/Sinterklaas narrative and tradition. There are probably hundreds. Even within The Netherlands there seem to be many often very local versions that can differ very much.


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## Guest (May 16, 2016)

Casebearer said:


> All throughout my reply I was talking about *the Sinterklaas feast in The Netherlands and Belgium only* because that's all I know about. So when I said Zwarte Piet is not an element of subconscious folkore I meant the role of Zwarte Piet in the Dutch Sinterklaas feast specifically. I should have been more precise on that probably.
> 
> In your post #11 you seem to imply, if I'm right, that Zwarte Piet is a traditional folklore element of the Dutch Sinterklaas legend. This is not the case. There are no Dutch and Belgian sources prior to 1850 in which Sinterklaas had a servant (black or white), he was on his own.


I disagree with that. I had read in some books that Sinterklaas was known to have a black servant before Schenkman brought it up. I can't remember the sources now but I did find this on the internet:

_There is some evidence that Sint Nicolaas was sometimes accompanied by a black servant even before Schenkman's book-though this may have been an actual servant, a person of color serving at the time in Amsterdam.

http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/zwarte-piet/_

So Schenkman may have put that in his book because he heard of it and not because he invented it although I would agree that he certainly popularized the idea which was probably an isolated regional legend at one time. And certainly this servant wasn't called Zwarte Piet.



> You're right when you say Zwarte Piet was an element of folklore. This was also the case in The Netherlands. There are some sources on Dutch folklore that mention a black man, sometimes named Zwarte Piet, a bogeyman that would come to take naughty children away. But prior to 1850 this Zwarte Piet had no connection to Sinterklaas. So what Jan Schenkman did was introduce a then popular folklore figure into the Sinterklaas narrative.


So it would appear that Schenkman sewed disparate bits of legend and folklore together. A Zwarte Piet bogeyman along with a legend of a black servant of Nicholas and legends outside of Holland such as the Germanic Krampus and the French Pere Frouttard as evil servants of Sint Nic and stitches together a new legend built out of old fragments of others. But the basic light-dark dualism very definitely is ancient and part of many religions and myths. Zoroastrianism was founded on it.



> So 'Zwarte Piet' is a traditional folklore element but he is not a traditional folkore element in the Dutch Sinterklaas legend (in the Netherlands at least). It was introduced from 'high culture' into popular culture over here.


Okay, I'll buy that.


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## Guest (May 16, 2016)

So let me recap how this relates to ragtime:

The Sinterklaas/Piet story shares roots with the mumming play which both involve a blackfaced villain. The mumming play in England was put on in the kitchens of high society by young bachelors from families of good standing. The mumming play came to America to Philadelphia (or perhaps New York) but seems to have quickly mutated into minstrel troupes of young bachelors putting on shows in people's kitchens (IOW, it took a distinctly American turn) and, by the 1840s, had become the cultural phenomenon of minstrelsy which mutated into cakewalk which mutated into ragtime.

I also think the mumming play shares roots with the third degree ritual of Freemasonry known as the Killing of Hiram Abiff. In this ritual, the candidate portrays Hiram, the Master Builder of Solomon's Temple. At the close of the workday, Hiram is leaving the yet-to-be-completed temple when he is accosted by three errant craftsmen known as the Three Ruffians who are named Jubelo, Jubela and Jubelum. They demand the secret Master's Word from him which he refuses to divulge so each ruffian strikes him and he keels over deader than a rusty coffin nail. So they bury the body by an acacia tree. When the murdered man is discovered, Solomon resurrects him with the Lion's Paw Grip. Although there is no blackface character, we have the same ancient celestial drama playing out.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Victor Redseal said:


> I disagree with that. I had read in some books that Sinterklaas was known to have a black servant before Schenkman brought it up. I can't remember the sources now but I did find this on the internet:
> 
> _There is some evidence that Sint Nicolaas was sometimes accompanied by a black servant even before Schenkman's book-though this may have been an actual servant, a person of color serving at the time in Amsterdam.
> 
> ...


That's what I'm saying! I agree with how you phrase it now except for the connection you make with Krampus and Pere Frouttard. The Zwarte Piet from Dutch folkore may still have had associations with the devil or evilness. But this is not the case for Zwarte Piet as part of the Sinterklaas narrative. This Zwarte Piet is primarily a double-faced servant of Sinterklaas. He is as much a children's friend - he rewards the sweet children - as he is a bogeyman that punishes the bad children. And let it be noted that all Dutch children - even I myself when I was a child - were as scared of Sinterklaas as they were of Zwarte Piet because they all knew Sinterklaas was the one that gave the verdict. Zwarte Piet - as his servant - was just the scary "Knecht" executing this white man's verdict. So if you wanna talk of light-dark dualism in this case you cannot connect it one on one to the white and the dark man. Together they had a light or dark message for you. Sinterklaas is the judge and Zwarte Piet the hangman but they work together in unison.


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## Guest (May 17, 2016)

That's how dualities work--two sides of the same coin which appear on the surface to oppose one another but, in reality, are mutually dependent--particle can't exist without the wave nor the wave without the particle even though they are opposites. Thank you, Casebearer, I'm glad somebody is willing to plumb the depths of consciousness with me concerning the connections between our rituals, our myths and our music.

Okay, moving on, folks, I was going through my really old photos and paraphernalia today that I've collected more than two decades ago and came across two nice tidbits:









Here is an image that came from a stereoscope. It depicts a very early minstrel troupe that, like the mummers of England, put on shows in people's houses. It just so happens to be titled "Fun in the Kitchen" and note the men in drag. I'm not sure of the date of this photo but it seems to hark from a time when minstrelsy and the mumming play hadn't quite yet fully separated. Weird, isn't it?

Then there is this:









This is the Queen City Cornet Band of Sedalia, Missouri. This is the first marching band known to play rags although they played classics and even opera. The photo is dated about 1896. The odd thing is that some say that the man on the far right clutching the cornet is Scott Joplin. Joplin lived in Sedalia in the 1890s and he did play cornet in the Queen City marching band. He was said to have left it though by 1894. However, I blew up the man's face and studied it against the earliest known photo of Joplin (taken about 1900 or 1901):










And it seems to me, without benefit of the proper equipment, expertise and original photo, that the man in the photo is indeed Scott Joplin. So either he was in the ensemble longer than assumed or the photo is older than assumed if the man in the photo actually is Joplin, of course. But I think it is.


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## Guest (May 21, 2016)

The center of ragtime publishing was not New York or Chicago but Detroit. One of the best known ragtime bands in the country was Old Man Finney's Orchestra. Violinist Theodore Finney of Columbus, Ohio came to Detroit in 1857. He partnered with John Bailey to form the Bailey & Finney Orchestra. After Bailey's death in 1870, Finney reorganized the band which played on a steamboat that sailed between Detroit and Sandusky, Ohio where the Cedar Point amusement park had just opened. He recruited excellent musicians and composers as Fred S. Stone and Harry P. Guy who, like Finney, were from Ohio.

When Old Man Finney died in 1899, Fred S. Stone took over the band:









Old Man Finney's Orchestra with director Fred S. Stone, center.

Although Detroit is known today's as a city run by blacks, it has always been a city where blacks had more clout than anywhere else, even New York. Back in the ragtime era, black musicians firmly controlled Detroit's musicians' union. Any musician--black or white--that wanted to join the musician's union in the Detroit area had to petition a black bandleader to have any hope of getting in. Fred S. Stone was one of those people. He held an unprecedented amount of power in Detroit's music scene.










Stone's "Belinda" from 1905 is often mistaken as a ragtime piece. It does have raggy elements but it is not truly a rag. A march with some light raggy flavoring.





Harry P. Guy was the pianist of Finney's band and a talented composer. This is, of course, a waltz and not a rag but Guy wrote a lot of ragtime also. In fact, he insisted that ragtime started in Detroit. While scholars have long dismissed his claim, a new crop of scholars operating on a wider gathering of data from that period are now giving Guy's assertion a serious look. Detroit was heavily involved in the ragtime scene. Guy went onto write arrangements for Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor.





Stone's "Ma Ragtime Baby" of 1898 was a huge hit and became a staple song of W. C. Handy when he came to Detroit in the 1890s and the band played the piece for him.









Sheet music for "Dat Gal O' Mine" by Ben Shook, violinist for the Finney band after Finney died. Originally from Ohio, Shook stayed in Detroit and became a big jazz promoter in the 1920s working with Jean Goldkette who came to Detroit and founded the first white swing band and promoted other talent as McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Glen Gray & the Casa Loma Orchestra--both bands had a huge influence on jazz in the 20s to the 40s.

If one looks at the publishers in the above clips, one sees names as Whitney-Warner, Remick and Willard Bryant. Chamberlain was another big Detroit publisher. Whitney-Warner was bought out by Jerome Remick in 1898. Remick was the son of a Detroit lumber tycoon (before Detroit became an automobile empire, it was known as a lumber empire) but Jerome had little interest in the lumber business. He was drawn to music publishing. When one sees old ragtime sheet music covers, one will often encounter the name Shapiro in New York as publisher. But before Maurice Shapiro founded his New York concern, he was in Detroit in 1902 as Remick's partner in Shapiro-Remick & Company. They were hugely successful in 1905 when they sold millions of copies "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree." Shapiro and Remick parted ways the following year.

Remick's new firm was Jerome H. Remick & Company. While they published all kinds of music, the ragtime genre was dominated by Remick. One need only peruse ragtime sheet music covers at random to see how influential Remick was. There were other Detroit publishers, of course, but Remick was the 800-lb. gorilla in the room--not only in Detroit but in the world.

Many great songwriters of the era such as Gus Kahn, Harry Warren, Al Dubin and even George Gershwin lived in Detroit while writing for Remick. Some of America's greatest songs of the ragtime and jazz eras were first published by Remick--"Pretty Baby," "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover," "Oh, You Beautiful Doll," "Bye Bye Blackbird," "Put On Your Old, Grey Bonnet," "I Only Have Eyes For You," etc.










The great cakewalk writer, Kerry Mills, was a violin teacher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and spent his career shuttling back and forth between Michigan and New York where he had founded his own concern--F. A. Mills Music Publisher (his real name was Frederick Allen Mills). He spent a great deal of time in Detroit looking for ideas for songs.


















This Charlotte Blake piece is from my own collection of sheet music.


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## Guest (May 28, 2016)

Ragtime had its place in blues. In the subgenre called Piedmont blues, ragtime was commonly mixed with blues. Geologically, the area of Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia and the Carolinas is called the Piedmont region and bluesman from these regions were dubbed the Piedmont bluesman and their sound was distinctive and very different from Mississippi, Texas or Memphis blues. A Piedmont bluesman usually had a wider repertoire of songs that often transcended blues. Ragtime was a staple of this subgenre which includes artists as Blind Boy Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Blind Blake and others.










Song about cocaine.





Blind Blake was extremely popular in the 20s and cut many sides for Paramount. He is an enigma, however, we're not sure where he was born although he spoke with the a Geechie accent indicating the Georgia coast. Others said Florida. He stated in one recording that his "right name" was Arthur Phelps but there are no records of such a person. He made a few recordings with Detroit pianist Charlie Spand and he played guitar for singer Irene Scruggs. He ceased to be heard from after 1932 when he apparently dropped off the face of the earth. His friend, Blind Willie McTell had heard Blake fell under a train and died but there is no record of such an event. White guitarist, Eddie Lang (Salvatore Massaro) used the name of Blind Blake when he played on the recordings of black artists and he died in 1932 and so that would seem to explain it except it doesn't. Blind Blake is stylistically very different from Lang and their voices were nothing alike. The photo shown in this clip is the only known photo of him (if indeed that is really him). Who Blind Blake really was, where he came from and whatever happened to him makes him perhaps the greatest enigma in blues.


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## Guest (May 29, 2016)

Dave Laibman is my favorite ragtime guitarist. He was the one who got me started in my exploration of this music over 20 years ago. I bought CD of his called "Ragtime Guitar" which I believe was on the Rounder label. It featured works of Joplin and Lamb and I fell madly in love with it. The next thing I knew, I was buying whatever ragtime CDs I could find and I started attending dixieland jazz shows and there I met Mike Montgomery who is a huge name in ragtime circles (and a fabulous pianist). It was like every book on ragtime mentioned him and a number of CDs of ragtime and early jazz piano rolls were from his collection and recorded on his pianola. I learned a lot from ol' Mike. A very, very knowledgeable guy and a walking encyclopedia of old music. Through him, I met Chris Ware and Reginald Robinson although I never met them in person. We corresponded. Again, two very knowledgeable guys. I tried to strike up a correspondence with Dennis Pash, another big ragtimer, but he wasn't having it. Another I met was Charlie Rasch--Ragtime Charley as he's called. Through these guys, I became a ragtime aficionado. But I owe it all to Dave Laibman for introducing me to the wonderful world of ragtime.





The actual title of this piece is "Rag Carpet Rag" and not "Red Carpet Rag" but has been mistitled for many decades now.





The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is one of my favorites. I have a few CDs by them. While we're used to hearing ragtime piano, these pieces were usually meant to be played by orchestras and string or horn bands. Everything Joplin wrote was actually meant to be played by ensembles. Paragon do a beautiful job--best I've heard--although the River Raisin Band here in the Detroit area is also extremely good.





Terry Waldo--a great ragtimer whether as a solo act or with his band. "Charleston" is not really ragtime but one of the early pieces of ragtime piano's successor--stride. I may cover stride later on this thread. Maybe not. I haven't decided yet.


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## Schubussy (Nov 2, 2012)

Victor Redseal said:


> Ragtime had its place in blues. In the subgenre called Piedmont blues, ragtime was commonly mixed with blues.


My favourite blues subgenre. I love the blues-ragtime mix.






I love this thread, just got through it all, lots of great music and history. Cheers Victor. :tiphat:


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## Guest (Jul 12, 2017)

Reviving this thread yet again to tell you about Riel Radio Ragtime. I looked for a channel that played ragtime and came across Riel Radio. They have several channels--one of them being ragtime. It apparently broadcasts from Detroit which is cool and strange. They play a wonderful variety of stuff from straight ragtime to dixieland jass to 20s jazz and early stride piano pieces to barbershop quartets to popular music from the turn of the 20th century and even some minstrelsy. Some recordings are modern and some original from the early 1900s. There is no other channel like this anywhere. Yes, you must subscribe and it costs like $8 a month but it is worth every penny and more. I'm addicted to it!!

I must be something of an aficionado because I can name a good 50% or more of what gets played and most the versions they play are from CDs that I have. But they play a lot of stuff I don't have and it's wonderful. I wrote to them complaining that they don't display the artist and song title so I can't buy this stuff. Gabrielle Riel wrote back to me and said that they do display it but some apps may not have it. She had me name the app I used and said she would get back to me on what to do. I just found it at the Goggle app store is all.

Anyway, I went to sleep last night with Ragtime Radio playing some truly delightful stuff. I fell asleep and at some point, I started to dream. In the dream, I saw a cartoon frog and grasshopper (might have been a cricket) and they were dressed to the nines and hoping over each other as this old ragtimey music played. Behind them were huge blades of grass and toadstools as big or bigger than they were. Then they took turns--one would dance some steps while the other clapped in time and then he would hand it off to the other. This cartoon dream was in full and beautiful color and looked old. You know how those old cartoons looked--like the old Ub Iwerks, Fleischer or Disney cartoons:




























But it wasn't a cartoon exactly. It was like a real place and I was a kind of detached observer. But the frog and grasshopper continued with their amazing dance in perfect time to the music. Other creatures gathered around to watch them--caterpillars, butterflies, fireflies, beetles, glow worms all bobbing in time to the music.

Then I woke up. It was just a few minutes before I had to get up for work anyway. The last ten seconds or so of the music I heard in the dream was still playing from my phone which was run through computer speakers. It was some modern ragtime band. It had piano and horns and strings and percussion and it was great stuff. After checking the time, I rolled over--I still had a few minutes. I thought, "That was cool as hell!"


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## Guest (Jul 12, 2017)

I heard from Gabrielle Riel today. They fixed my problem with the metadata so now I can see artist, title and source. I asked about the weird commercial spots they run. They are completely incomprehensible--an ad for Mari-Kesh Mondrago "the Oasis of the Steamlands." Other commercials referenced "alternative history communities" and "Steam Mall." Huh??? She explained that Riel Radio started in 2007 as an outgrowth of a virtual community called "Second Life." They were making soundtracks for the community. Soon, they were making soundtracks for virtual communities all over the internet and decided to go public on the entire internet. She said they now have more listeners who are not part of the virtual community environment and so the ads sound strange but these communities are big sponsors and without them Riel Radio could not survive. So all the weird cities that I hear in the commercials are the names of virtual communities. Apparently, this is a big thing online.

I looked at Gabrielle's Google page and it was all virtual sim art and in the steampunk vein. One channel is a steampunk channel. I have not listened to it. Although the ragtime station started off as a steampunk channel. Learn something new everyday.


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## Guest (Jul 26, 2017)

Victor Redseal said:


> The ragtime era was, in fact, largely female driven. Even rags that bore male names as composers were frequently written by women whose publishers feared wouldn't sell well if they public knew they were female writers. Some women, however, as Elsie Janis, were able to build careers as both writers and performers. But such ladies were a rarity. Truly unfortunate since they proved themselves every bit the equal of men and, frankly, were better than most of them. I certainly find myself constantly listening the rags written by ladies not for that reason but simply because I love the way they sound.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Whenever I put out bad information, I want to correct it as soon as possible. On the section covering the women of ragtime, I gave a lot of sketchy, incorrect info and I want to rectify that.

I said Irene Cozad only published two rags and no one is sure what became of her. Balderdash! She was born in Iowa in 1888. She apparently came to KC to further her musical career. She played piano with the Kansas City Symphony prior to her marriage to an M.D. in 1912. She taught music or at least was listed as a teacher of some sort in the city's directory. They had two children--one male and one female. After the death of her husband, Irene lived with her son and his wife. Her grandson was living in the same house as late as 1988.

Under the name Irene Shirer, she won $100 in a songwriting contest in 1920 for her piece, "Kansas City Town." She wrote other pieces as "Sunday Wedding Day" "Minute Circle Whirl" and "Because." She died in Overland Park, KS in 1970.

Julia Niebergall was born in Indianapolis in 1886. While she was a very good pianist and got paid for her gigs, she did not depend on gigs for her livelihood as she had another line of work. Her rags made her famous in Indianapolis and with the royalties she earned, bought a car and became one of the earliest female drivers in Indianapolis. She died in that city in 1968.

May Aufderheide was also born in Indianapolis in 1890. She received classical training on the piano as a girl from her aunt, May Kolmer who was supposedly superb on the instrument. After high school, she toured Europe with her parents. Upon her return home, she decided to compose ragtime. "Dusty Rag" was her first piece which was published in 1908 when she was just 18. It sold so well that her father founded his own musical publishing company. He published 19 of his daughter's pieces.

After she and her husband adopted a baby girl, Lucy, May Aufderheide, seemingly retired from music or her creative output dried up on her. In 1947, her husband retired and they had a great deal of wealth. They moved to Pasadena where May died in 1972 at age 92.

Euday L. Bowman I still know little about.

Sadie Koninsky was born in Troy, New York in 1879 in a fairly well-to-do Jewish family. As a high school student, she studied violin as a serious musician. Although not trained on piano, she played quite well and, at age 17, composed "Eli Green's Cakewalk" which was published by Joseph Stern in New York and became an instant hit in 1896. So famous did the piece became that Sadie began a serious study of piano under the prestigious pedagogue and author, Harriet Brower, in New York who was considered one of the finest teachers in the country, if not the world. Afterward, Sadie went to Boston to continue her violin studies under Kate Atherton Barker, head of the violin studies department at the Emma Willard Conservatory of Music.

Sadie returned to Troy and, with her brothers who were all musicians, founded her own music publishing concern and orchestra in 1904. They also had a music store in Troy where Sadie taught violin. She was considered one of the finest violinist teachers in the country. Sadie possessed a very keen understanding of the music business due her extensive experience as a published composer and her brothers relied on her expertise. She worked as a staff writer for Joseph Stern and also worked as an arranger for Koninsky Music. In the early 20s, she founded Goldwyn Publishers. Other songs of hers include "Boardin' House Johnson: Cakewalk", "Phoebe Thompson's Cakewalk", "When I Return We'll Be Wed", "Cleopatra: An Egyptian Intermezzo", "I Wants a Man Who Isn't Afraid to Work", "A Wigwam Courtship: Intermezzo", "Cuz the Sandman's Comin' Round" and 'in Yucatan: A Novelty Foxtrot."

She lived in Troy the rest of her days, outliving all the other members of her family. She died in Troy in 1952 at age 71.


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## Guest (Aug 12, 2017)

Some of my latest ragtime acquisitions. I ordered this one off Amazon. The Biograph label is closely associated with my friend, Mike Montgomery, who is considered one of the foremost ragtime authorities in the world. He's forgotten more about ragtime, jass and the old Tin Pan Alley songs than I could ever hope to learn. His house is like a ragtime museum--full of old sheet music, records, cylinders, piano rolls, victrolas, cylinder-players, magazines, handbills, photographs, old-time pianos (he's an absolutely fabulous ragtime and dixieland pianist), and a 1910 player-piano or pianola as they are actually called. anything you want to know about that era, you call on Mikey--he knows, he knows everything! Once I asked him for a complete listing of Maceo Pinkard songs cuz I love Maceo Pinkard. A couple of days later, I get a several typewritten sheets listing every Pinkard song with collaborators, publishers and year of publication. Wisely, I got it into digital format and published it on the internet in several places and one of Pinkard's relatives actually wrote me and thanked me for the list!

So this is a collection of Mikey's piano rolls played on his 1910 pianola. In the liner notes, he explains how a player piano works--you pump these pedals and this creates a vacuum inside the piano, the roll is installed on a feed and a take-up spool. The vacuum causes a pneumatic motor to start turning and the action engages. Mikey goes into a much longer spiel than I will here and I bring it up because this CD has been recorded so that you can hear the roll spinning, the action engaging and the pedals pumping as the piano plays. The goal was to make you feel like you are sitting at the piano listening to it play. I have another Biograph CD of Jelly Roll Morton's piano rolls (some of which also appear on this CD) which Mike also pumped. The production was slicker with all the player-piano sounds gated out of the recording but this one leaves all the odd thumpings and whirrings in.

The rolls include three Morton compositions, three Fats Wallers, three Joplins, two James P. Johnsons, three Eubie Blakes, a Jimmy Blythe and a Charles Clark. A very nice addition for any enthusiasts of the old-time music of America--the stuff that spawned today's blues, jazz, rock n roll and even hip-hop.


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## Guest (Aug 12, 2017)

I also ordered this off Amazon. I was hesitant because I thought it was going to be like the million other ragtime collections I have except this has a lot of ragtime numbers I don't have. Boy, was I wrong! This is some hard-drivin' ragtime! Generally, instead of just a piano, they added in drums, double bass, guitar and you name it to really get these numbers swingin'! Some of these numbers drive so hard on the drums it reminds me of the hardcore punk stuff of the 80s! I figure this was how ragtime was really played in the saloons and clubs of yesteryear to get the patrons off their butts and on their feet. Ragtime was, after all, dance music if nothing else.

So this is something any ragtime fan should enjoy. You don't normally hear this kind of ragtime unless you have the records of That Crazy Guy Earl Krause and Barrel-Fingers Barry who do some of the best piano-drum ragtime you'll ever hear but I can't find their stuff on CD, it all seems to be on vinyl only. Nice booklet inside this one and I love that cover!


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## Guest (Aug 12, 2017)

I ordered this one off Amazon after I heard it on the Riel Radio Ragtime channel. The artist is listed as Uri Caine and I kept thinking, "Uri Caine--where have I heard that name before?" When I looked at the personnel who played on this one, it came to me. The clarinetist is Don Byron. Ii have a Don Byron jazz CD called "Bug Music" which I loved and Uri Caine was the pianist. He's a fantastically good pianist.

What makes this album great is that the studio recordings don't sound like studio recordings. Through excellent production values, Caine and the producer made this CD sound, as one reviewer put it, like the soundtrack of a documentary. All the songs sound like they are being played live and might even have been in some instances. It is mixed in with the ambient sounds of New York but not modern New York but the New York of the 1890s and early 1900s. The sounds of horse-drawn carriages and taverns where various ethnic performances are bring played for the merriment of patrons. The sounds of people talking, laughing and singing along are heard as well as glasses clinking and seats scooting and you name it. It features Irish-American, German-American, Jewish-American, Hispanic-American songs. Interestingly, the version of 1908's "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" is sung in German.

One memorable track includes the sound of a thunderstorm--rain pattering the street and thunder rolling and clashing--while in the distance, a single horn is heard playing "Daisy Bell" (Bicycle Built for Two) in a slow, melancholy fashion as though someone were playing it in a nearby alley or over on the next street. Snatches of conversation are heard as though people are bring interviewed. Sometimes two songs are juxtaposed against one another as the sounds of people talking in the background are heard. As stated, it sounds like a documentary soundtrack. Some of it is ragtime but it is all Tin Pan Alley stuff from its golden age. The cd seems to run the gamut of many years though as one patron can be heard asking where his keys are. Car keys were developed around 1949.

Tin Pan Alley, btw, got its name from the fact that it was a city block full of offices and each one had a piano where the songwriters worked feverishly to get songs out there to the public. If you stood in the middle of this block, you heard the din of so many pianos playing all around you at once that it sounded like tin pans were crashing to the floor and hence its name.

The Cd itself, is a work of art with a beautiful booklet capturing New York from that period.


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