Ragtime

By the 1890s American parlors were full of upright pianos and American publishers were selling sheet music by the millions, and both were hungry for something new. What arrived was ragtime — a piano style with a steady march bass in the left hand and a melody in the right that landed persistently off the beat, so that the tune seemed to pull against its own accompaniment. It came out of Black communities in the Mississippi valley, from players working saloons, sporting houses, and clubs, and it spread from the midway of the 1893 Chicago world's fair.

Scott Joplin, born in Texas to a father who had been enslaved, gave the form its most durable music. Maple Leaf Rag, published in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1899, sold hundreds of thousands of copies over the following years and made him the best-known composer of the style. Joplin insisted that rags be played at a moderate tempo rather than raced, and wrote them as serious compositions rather than novelties. He also wrote an opera, Treemonisha, which he could not get staged in his lifetime and which was not fully performed until 1972.

Ragtime was the first Black American music to become a national commercial product, and it moved on paper rather than on records. Sheet music, piano rolls, and the parlor piano carried it into white middle-class homes, where it was played by people who had never heard a Black musician perform. Publishers flooded the market with rags of every quality. Critics, clergy, and music teachers denounced it as vulgar and a corrupter of the young, in language that later generations recycled almost word for word for jazz, for rock and roll, and for rap.

The craze faded after about 1917, absorbed into the jazz that was displacing it, and the music was largely forgotten until a scholarly and popular revival in the 1970s helped along by the film The Sting. Its syncopation is the direct ancestor of the rhythmic feel of everything that followed in American popular music, and Joplin's rags have entered the standard piano repertoire. Ragtime also established the commercial pattern — Black invention, white publishing profit, national appetite — that the next century of the American music industry repeated with little variation.