The History of Jazz (5 page)

Yet ultimately Smith can be rightly viewed as, at least in part, the victim of the lifestyle excesses that she celebrated in her music. Alcohol and smoking coarsened her voice; her drinking binges led to violent outbursts, which made many in the industry wary of this temperamental star; her marriage to policeman Jack Gee developed into the type of exploitive personal relationship so often the subject of blues songs. While her career was in bloom, and the money was coming in, Smith was able to rise above these troubles, but the collapse in the recording industry during the early 1930s occurred at the same time that urban black audiences were turning to the faster-paced and slicker music of the larger jazz ensembles. Even so, a star of this magnitude can sometimes resist forces that would bring down a lesser artist, and in 1937 Smith seemed on the verge of a comeback. Recording and performing opportunities were on the rise, and even appearances in films—Smith had already been involved in a short movie in the late 1920s—were being discussed.

These plans never came to fruition. During a tour in the Deep South, Smith was killed in a car accident on September 26, 1937. She was forty-three years old. Two years later, Ma Rainey would die from a heart attack at age fifty-three. The record industry would eventually recover from its troubles and enjoy unprecedented success in the 1940s and later decades, but the era of classic blues had ended with the passing of these two seminal figures. Their influence, however, continues to echo in the work of countless later singers, whose note bending and stage strutting could hardly be envisioned without the pioneering efforts of these grand divas of secular African American music.

Ragtime music rivals the blues in importance—and perhaps surpasses it in influence—as a predecessor to early jazz. Indeed, in the early days of New Orleans jazz, the line between ragtime and jazz was so fine that the two terms were often used interchangeably. With the benefit of hindsight, we can draw sharp distinctions between these two genres, but in the context of African American music in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, the grounds for such subtle delineations were hardly so clear.

In his Library of Congress recordings, Jelly Roll Morton demonstrated an illuminating comparison of two ways of playing Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”—one reflecting the Missouri ragtime tradition and the second showing a New Orleans jazz–inflected approach to the composition. But even with Morton, the dividing line between these two styles could be elusive: in this same series of interviews, Morton asserted that the celebrated jazz pianists of the 1930s, such as Fats Waller and Art Tatum, were simply “ragtime pianists in a very fine form.” Few jazz historians would agree with this latter categorization, but statements such as these reveal how fluid the borderline between ragtime and jazz could seem to educated listeners, and not just at the turn of the century, but well into the era of swing music and big bands.

Perhaps the best way of understanding the differences and similarities between these two musical idioms is to distinguish between ragtime as a manner of composition and ragtime as a style of instrumental (primarily piano) performance. The similarities Morton perceived between ragtime and 1930s jazz relate primarily to keyboard techniques, most notably the striding on-the-beat bass employed by the left hand and the riveting right-hand syncopations. The latter were often so predominant in ragtime that entire melody lines might be constructed out of repeated syncopated figures. The result, at its worst, was a melody so convoluted and inherently pianistic that few vocalists could sing it, and fewer would want to. But even the second-rate rag pieces compensated for this lack of melodic integrity through the manic rhythmic intensity of their two-handed assault of the keys.

In ragtime’s finer moments, especially in the mid and late career efforts of Scott Joplin, these devices were subtly incorporated into his supremely memorable melodies, the syncopations employed in the same way a master chef adds spice to a recipe, for shades of flavor, not overpowering effect. The left-hand structures of ragtime were equally influential, with a whole generation of jazz pianists adopting its use of a resounding low bass note or octave (sometimes a fifth or tenth) on beats one and three, followed by a middle register chord on beats two and four. The resulting combination of the pounding four-to-the-bar foundation of the left hand and the rhythmic acrobatics of the right hand was a full-bodied piano sound that required no other accompaniment. This style of performance became known as “ragging” or “ragged time” at some point in the nineteenth century, a term that likely served as the source for the generic title ragtime.

Ragtime rhythms appeared in print as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, but the first published ragtime piece is generally acknowledged to be “Mississippi Rag” (1897), composed by William Krell. Later that same year, Tom Turpin became the first black composer to publish a ragtime composition with his work “Harlem Rag.” Both are well crafted and suggest that the ragtime style had been in incubation for some time prior to their appearance. Before the year was out, Ben Harney had published his method book
Rag Time Instructor
, the first of many pedagogical works that built on, and fueled, the public’s appetite for this intoxicating new music. By the turn of the century, the ragtime craze was in full swing, so much so that highbrow critics felt compelled to attack it. “Ragtime’s days are numbered,” declared
Metronome
magazine in 1901. “We are sorry to think that anyone should imagine that ragtime was of the least musical importance. It was a popular wave in the wrong direction.”
²⁴
That same year, the American Federation of Musicians ordered its members to desist from playing ragtime, declaring “the musicians know what is good, and if the people don’t, we will have to teach them.”

In the midst of this rapid dissemination of a new musical style, the term
rag
invariably became both overused and misapplied, often employed indiscriminately to denote a wide range of African American musical idioms. As a result, published compositions from this period may use the word
rag
in their title while bearing little resemblance to what has come to be known as classic rag style, just as many so-called blues compositions strayed, sometimes considerably, from the standard twelve-bar form. But as the style evolved, ragtime coalesced into a structured four-theme form, with each melody typically encompassing sixteen bars. The most common form for these classic rag pieces was AABBACCDD, with a modulation to a different key typically employed for the C theme.

Although the published ragtime compositions came to include vocal works and band arrangements, this style reached its highest pitch as a form of solo piano music. Nor should this be surprising. In many ways, the spread of this jubilant new music went hand in hand with the growing popularity of pianos in turn-of-the-century American households. Between 1890 and 1909, total piano production in the United States grew from under 100,000 instruments per year to over 350,000—and it is worth noting that 1909 marked the peak level not only in American piano production but also in the number of ragtime pieces published.
²⁵
By 1911, a staggering 295 separate companies engaged in the manufacture of pianos had set up operations in the United States—by comparison there are only three local producers remaining today—while another 69 businesses served the market for piano supplies. During this same period, player pianos increasingly made their way into homes and gathering places. In 1897, the same year that witnessed the publication of the first ragtime piece, the Angelus cabinet player piano, the first such instrument to use a pneumatic push-up device to depress the keys, was released to an enthusiastic marketplace, and by 1919 player pianos constituted over half the output of the U.S. piano industry. These two powerful trends—the spread of pianos into American households and the growing popularity of mechanical player pianos—helped spur the enormous public appetite for ragtime music during the early years of the twentieth century.

This unprecedented outpouring of ragtime artistry was centered, to a striking degree, in a fairly small geographical area. Just as the rural blues blossomed in the hothouse atmosphere of the Mississippi Delta, and as early jazz would later flourish in the environs of New Orleans, so early ragtime reached its zenith in turn-of-the-century Missouri. The cities of Sedalia, Carthage, and St. Louis, among others, served as home base for a who’s who of rag composers, as well as an ambitious group of music publishers who recognized the extraordinary body of talent at hand. In Sedalia, a booming railroad town that almost became the state capital, Scott Joplin gathered a cadre of promising rag composers around him, including his students Scott Hayden and Arthur Marshall, while Sedalia music publisher John Stark, a major advocate for ragtime in general and Joplin in particular, proved to be an important catalyst in bringing the work of these local composers to the attention of the broader public. Stark, Joplin, and Hayden eventually moved to St. Louis, another major center of rag activity during these glory years. The local composers there also included Louis Chauvin, an exceptionally talented native of the city who left behind all too few compositions, as well as Tom Turpin and Artie Matthews. In Carthage, Missouri, James Scott created a number of outstanding ragtime pieces, many of which were published by the local Dumars music store where Scott worked— initially washing windows and sweeping floors, and later serving as composer-in-residence. Eventually Scott also benefited from a fruitful partnership with Stark, one that produced a body of compositions second only to Joplin’s as exemplars of the ragtime style. With the exception of Joseph Lamb, a white composer from Montclair, New Jersey, virtually all the leading exponents of the classic rag style made their home, at one point or another, in Missouri.

Scott Joplin stands out as the greatest of these composers. In fact, the resurgence of interest in ragtime that began in the 1970s would be hard to imagine if not for the timeless appeal of Joplin’s music. While others may have written rags that were more technically demanding or that boasted more striking novelty effects, none could approach the structural elegance, the melodic inventiveness, or the range of expression that characterized Joplin’s major works. Nor would any other rag composer match Joplin’s ambitions for the music—ambitions that led to the composition of two operas, a ballet, and other works that squarely challenged the lowbrow reputation of the rag idiom. Although his more daring works never gained the acceptance, at least during his lifetime, that Joplin craved, his oeuvre stands out today all the more due to the high standards to which he aspired, as well as to his determined belief in ragtime as a serious form of music—a belief that, more than a half-century after Joplin’s death, became validated by his belated enshrinement as a major American composer.

Joplin was born in Texarkana, Texas, probably in 1868. His father, the former slave Jiles Joplin, had played the violin for house parties given by the local slave owner in the days before the Emancipation Proclamation, while his mother, Florence Givens Joplin, sang and played the banjo. The latter instrument may have had an impact on Scott’s musical sensibilities: the syncopated rhythms of nineteenth-century African American banjo music are clear predecessors of the later piano rag style. The banjo itself has a fascinating lineage—in America it is considered the plaything of hillbillies and rustics, but its roots are clearly African, where it is prefigured in many variants, and is often associated with bards and nobility. It is all too fitting that Scott Joplin’s earliest encounters with music came via this rare American survival of lofty African performance traditions.

While Scott was still in his youth, his father left the family, and his mother was forced to rely on work as a domestic to support her six children. The future composer already exhibited his affinity for the keyboard at this early age. He often accompanied his mother to the houses where she worked and would play and improvise on the piano while she went about her chores. By his teens, Joplin had established himself as a professional pianist, with opportunities to ply his trade at churches, clubs, and social gatherings in the border area of Texas and Arkansas. Later he became involved in teaching music as well as singing with a vocal quintet that performed widely in the region. During this period, Joplin made his first attempts at composition.

At some point in the mid-1880s, Joplin moved to St. Louis, where he supported himself primarily as a pianist, both as a soloist in saloons and other nightspots as well as with a band. The ensemble work gave Joplin an opportunity to develop the skills in arranging that would later reach their pinnacle in orchestrations for his two operas. Joplin made his home in St. Louis for almost a decade, but he traveled widely during these years. His visit to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a massive fair that attracted some of the finest musicians of the day, may have been especially influential. Although ragtime music had not yet been published, it was apparently widely played at the Exposition, albeit most often at the outskirts of the fairgrounds, where black musicians performed—while the choicer, more centrally located venues were reserved for white entertainers. At some point in the mid-1890s, Joplin settled down in Sedalia, where he eventually undertook formal study of harmony and composition at the nearby George R. Smith College.

Around 1897, Joplin wrote the “Maple Leaf Rag,” a composition that was destined to become the most famous ragtime piece of its day. It wasn’t until two years later that John Stark published the work, and over the next twelve months only four hundred copies were sold. But in the fall of 1900, the “Maple Leaf Rag” caught on with the general public, and became the first piece of sheet music to sell more than one million copies—a figure all the more stunning when one realizes that there were fewer than 100,000 professional musicians and music teachers in the United States at the time. Amateur pianists, for their part, must have found it anything but easy to navigate the technical and rhythmic difficulties of Joplin’s celebrated rag; however, many no doubt purchased the sheet music and labored over its intricate syncopations.