26 July 2008
The Ragtime Craze, 1896-1918
A highly syncopated African-American influenced sound emerges by 1900
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
This same period saw the intensification of African-American musical influence, a trend best represented by ragtime. Ragtime emerged in the 1880s, its popularity peaking in the decade after the turn of the century. In some regards the ragtime craze was a descendant of minstrelsy, but the ragtime style also represented a more intimate engagement with African-American musical techniques and values, due to the increasing involvement of black songwriters and performers in the music industry.
The word “ragtime” derives from the African-American term “to rag,” meaning to enliven a piece of music by shifting melodic accents onto the offbeats (a technique known as syncopation). This technique has the effect of intensifying the beat and creating rhythmic momentum. The basic patterns of ragtime music were transferred from the banjo, a stringed instrument developed by slave musicians from African prototypes. Ragtime was also influenced by Latin American rhythms such as the Cuban habanera and by marching band music. During the height of its popularity, from the late 1890s until the end of World War I, ragtime music was played by every imaginable type of ensemble: dance bands, brass bands, country string bands, symphony orchestras, banjo and mandolin ensembles, and, in the classic ragtime style, by solo pianists.
The growing market for ragtime songs at the turn of the century suggests a continuation of the white fascination with African-American music first evinced in minstrelsy. Tin Pan Alley composers simply added syncopated rhythms and ersatz black dialects to spice up bland popular tunes. The idea was to create songs novel enough to stimulate the audience’s interest but not so radical that they required a great deal of work on the listener’s part. Just as the songs performed by blackface minstrels were European in style, most popular ragtime songs were march-style songs with “irregular” rhythms added for effect.
Some young white Americans associated themselves with ragtime to rebel against the cultural conservatism of their parents and other authority figures, a pattern that became even more prominent during the jazz age of the 1920s and the rock ’n’ roll era of the 1950s. Ragtime is an interesting example of the complex crosscurrents of American musical history: rooted in the mastery of European musical forms by talented black musicians, the style circulated across boundaries of race, class, region, and generation and was put to different uses by various communities.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
