#KING OF RAGTIME HOW TO#

#KING OF RAGTIME HOW TO#

So how to hear ragtime as it was experienced in its day-not as your great grandmother’s music, but something new, subversive, sexy. Inspired by Vernon and Irene Castle, she would have danced the Grizzly Bear and Turkey Trot to ragtime in the dance halls that were springing up all over New York, turning the metropolis into the “City of Dreadful Dance.” And one of the ways a young lady of 1913 might have fun would be dancing. She’s a young woman I wanted her to have some fun. In this novel, lady’s maid Jane Prescott has a week off. Ragtime, and its impact, is one of the threads in my third Jane Prescott mystery, Death of an American Beauty. Scott Joplin was the “King of Ragtime,” composing more than one hundred pieces, including “The Entertainer.” Despite the enormous popularity of his music, Joplin died impoverished at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center in 1917 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens. Of course, as with most American music innovation, the true scandal lay in the fact that ragtime started as an African American form. This photo is in the public domain via Wikicommons. Louis Globe-Democrat newspaper, June 7, 1903. The American Federation of Musicians adopted a resolution denouncing ragtime songs as “unmusical rot” and pledged to suppress the playing of “such musical trash.”

In 1912, a letter writer to the Times bemoaned ragtime’s immoral influence, especially on the young and urged those in power to “stamp out the epidemic of these positively dangerous songs.” Not only were the rhythms provocative, but the songs often featured “marital infidelity, risqué situations, and crude twistings of coarse phrases.” It wasn’t just John Q.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone being shocked by “Maple Leaf Rag” or “Frog Legs Rag.”Īnd yet shocked people were. It’s the subject of EL Doctorow’s epic of early 20 th century New York, the soundtrack for The Sting-and seemingly an entire era of pre- WWI American innocence. Wildly popular from 1895 to 1919, the “ragged” or syncopated music immediately evokes a simpler, sweeter time of parasols, lemonade, and straw hats. Ragtime-it’s quintessential old-timey American sound.

This photo is in the public domain via Wikicommons Mulberry Street in New York City’s Little Italy (circa 1900). Home » Cultural History » The King of Ragtime The King of Ragtime Posted on Apby Mariah FredericksĪuthor Mariah Fredericks sets the scene for her latest novel, Death of an American Beauty, as she traces the rise of ragtime in New York City in the early 1900s.

King of ragtime