Ragtime

• 1. Introduction

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  Ragtime is a musical style built on a syncopated, deliberately ragged rhythm, and it turned into the sound of an entire era. The style rose to popularity in the 1890s through the 1910s, driven by composers such as James Scott, Joseph Lamb and, above all, Scott Joplin, who became known as the King of Ragtime. Ragtime pieces are usually written for piano, built from several distinct themes arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises, and closely related to the military march. The style shaped early jazz, Harlem stride piano and Piedmont blues, and reached classical composers across Europe. By the 1920s jazz had eclipsed it almost entirely, yet ragtime kept resurfacing, most famously in the 1970s when a handful of old rags scored a hit Hollywood film. Its origins reach back further still, to dance events held on plantations decades before anyone wrote the music down.

• 2. Rags Before Ragtime

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  The word ragtime was first written down in 1896, though the music behind it was likely decades older by then. The term probably grew out of dance gatherings called rags, hosted by enslaved Black people on plantations and mentioned in newspapers as early as the 1820s. The first recorded use of the actual word came from the vaudeville musician Ben Harney, who used it that year to describe piano music he had adapted from banjo and fiddle players. Those early ensembles typically paired a banjo with a fiddle, playing jigs, reels and schottisches, and it was the banjo's playing style that supplied the syncopation ragtime later became known for.

  The Dream Rag, originally titled The Bull Dyke's Dream and composed by Jessie Pickett, is believed to be among the oldest preserved ragtime pieces, though no recordings from that early period survive. Its exact date of composition is unknown, but Eubie Blake, whom Pickett taught the piece to around 1900, believed it had been written before the Civil War. Unlike the march-style left hand of later rags, The Dream Rag uses a rhythm closer to the habanera, a trace of Spanish musical influence. Pickett performed it at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where the wider American public first encountered what would become ragtime. Scott Joplin, Ben Harney and Shep Edmonds, sometimes called the father of ragtime, were all present at the same fair.

  Louis Moreau Gottschalk offers an even earlier trace. Born in New Orleans in 1829, he grew up within earshot of Congo Square, the city's traditional Sunday gathering place for African American music and dance. Gottschalk was not a ragtime composer, but elements of his surviving work trace directly back to what he heard at Congo Square, foreshadowing the ragtime style that would emerge some sixty years later.

• 3. St. Louis to Sheet Music

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  Composed ragtime took shape in the African American communities of the Mississippi Valley during the 1890s, especially in St. Louis. Most of the earliest ragtime musicians could not read or notate music at all. They played by ear and improvised, working out tunes on a banjo or a piano in brothels, bars, saloons and the informal house parties and juke joints where European classical music mixed freely with African American folk song.

  The earliest published ragtime compositions appeared in 1895. Ben Harney's song "You've Been a Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down" had its copyright registered that January by the Greenup Music Company in Louisville, Kentucky, and it became a significant early hit that helped carry the genre to mainstream audiences. Several months later, in September 1895, the minstrel comedian Ernest Hogan registered the copyright for "La Pas Ma La", often cited as the earliest published ragtime work by a Black composer. Irving Jones, a comedian and songwriter, was another early pioneer of the style.

  Scott Joplin, born around 1868 in Texas, became the genre's defining figure after the 1899 publication of "Maple Leaf Rag". For at least twelve years afterward, its melody lines, chord progressions and metric patterns shaped the work of other ragtime composers. Joplin followed it with further hits, including "The Entertainer" in 1902, but he was largely forgotten outside a small circle of enthusiasts until ragtime's major revival in the early 1970s. In a 1913 interview with the Black newspaper New York Age, Joplin pushed back against the idea that ragtime was new, insisting there had been "ragtime music in America ever since the Negro race has been here, but the white people took no notice of it until about twenty years ago."

• 4. Ragtime's Golden Age

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  Piano "professors" such as Jelly Roll Morton played ragtime, by then the first African American music to reach mainstream popular culture, in the sporting houses of New Orleans, a polite euphemism for the city's bordellos, while brass bands and society dance orchestras carried the style into more respectable settings. Bands led by W. C. Handy and James R. Europe were among the first Black ensembles to cross the color line in American music. The new rhythms reshaped dance bands and produced new dance steps, popularized during the 1910s by the show-dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, and the resulting growth in dance orchestras continued on into the 1920s.

  In 1912, the American Ragtime Octette gave the first public ragtime concerts in Britain, carried across the Atlantic in part by shipboard orchestras on the transatlantic passenger lines, performing at the Hippodrome in London under the composer and pianist Lewis F. Muir. British audiences embraced the group, and its performances of Muir's own rags, including "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee" and "Hitchy-Koo", were later credited by the historian Ian Whitcomb as the first American popular songs to shape British culture and music. That same year, the octette recorded some of Muir's rags for the British label The Winner Records, the first ragtime recordings made anywhere in Europe. James R. Europe's own 369th Regiment band drew enormous enthusiasm on tour in France in 1918.

• 5. Sound and Structure

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  A rag is built like a modified march, with the left hand striking bass notes on the strong first and third beats and chords on the weak second and fourth, underneath a syncopated right-hand melody. The jazz critic Rudi Blesh thought the style's polyrhythm might trace back to African music, though no historian or musicologist has ever pinned down a direct connection. Some sources trace the name ragtime itself to that syncopated, "ragged" right-hand rhythm. A rag written in triple time is known as a ragtime waltz, but ragtime is not a meter the way a march is duple or a waltz is triple. It is instead a rhythmic effect that can be layered onto almost any meter, built from melodic accents that land between the beats rather than on them, so the tune seems to pull against the pulse even as it makes the listener want to move.

  Scott Joplin called that effect "weird and intoxicating." He also described how to achieve it, instructing players to "play slowly until you catch the swing." The word swing later gave its name to an entire style of jazz descended from ragtime. Turning an ordinary piece of music into a rag by altering the timing of its melody notes was known, at the time, simply as ragging it.

  A typical rag contains several distinct themes, four being the most common number, each usually 16 bars long and split into four four-bar phrases. These themes were arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises, commonly AABBACCC', AABBCCDD or AABBCCA, with the first two strains set in the tonic key and the later ones shifting to the subdominant. Composers sometimes added introductions or bridges of four to 24 bars between the themes. On the sheet music for his song "Leola", Joplin left a handwritten warning: "Notice! Don't play this piece fast. It is never right to play 'ragtime' fast." The novelist E. L. Doctorow later borrowed that exact line as the epigraph for his novel Ragtime. That same era spun off a whole family of related dances and vocal styles, some remembered less fondly than others.

• 6. Race and Related Styles

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  The following year, Hogan released another song, "All Coons Look Alike to Me", which went on to sell a million copies. The vaudeville entertainer Tom Fletcher, who later wrote 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business, credited Hogan as the first to "put on paper the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians." The song's success carried ragtime rhythms to a much wider country audience, but its use of racial slurs also spawned a wave of derogatory imitation tunes known as coon songs, built on racist and stereotypical portrayals of Black people. In his later years, Hogan admitted shame and a sense of what he called race betrayal over the song, while still expressing pride in having helped bring ragtime to a larger audience.

  Ragtime's mature form is usually dated to 1897, the year "Harlem Rag" by Tom Turpin and "Mississippi Rag" by William Krell were both published.

  The cakewalk, a pre-ragtime dance representing a mock African American contest for a cake prize, stayed popular until about 1904, and many early rags are built as cakewalks, one entry in a whole cluster of related dances and vocal styles the genre spun off. The two-step held on until about 1911 and produced a large number of rags of its own, while the slow drag, another early dance form, produced a smaller number still. The coon song, a pre-ragtime vocal style built on crude, racist lyrics often performed by white singers in blackface, remained popular until about 1901 before giving way to the ragtime song, a more general vocal form. Irving Berlin became the most commercially successful composer of ragtime songs. His 1911 hit "Alexander's Ragtime Band" was the most widely performed and recorded piece of its kind, even though it contains almost no actual ragtime syncopation. After the First World War, a new style called stride piano emerged, developed and dominated by Black East Coast pianists including James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Willie "The Lion" Smith. Johnson went on to compose "Charleston", the song most associated with the Roaring Twenties.

• 7. Revivals in America

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  In the early 1940s, jazz bands began working ragtime back into their repertoire, releasing recordings on 78 rpm records. The most famous recording from that period is Pee Wee Hunt's version of Euday L. Bowman's "Twelfth Street Rag." A more significant revival followed in the 1950s, when a wider variety of older ragtime styles reached record buyers and new rags were composed, published and recorded. Many of these recordings used what were called prepared pianos, instruments deliberately left out of tune with tacks fitted to the hammers, meant to recreate the sound of an old honky-tonk.

  Two developments in the 1960s pushed ragtime further into public view. In 1960, Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh published They All Played Ragtime, sometimes called the Ragtime Bible, the first serious attempt to document the music's first era and its three most important composers, Joplin, Scott and Lamb. Around the same time, the pianist Max Morath rose to prominence, creating two television series for National Educational Television, the forerunner of PBS: The Ragtime Era in 1960 and The Turn of the Century in 1962. Morath turned the second series into a one-man stage show in 1969 and toured the United States with it for five years, and a new generation of ragtime composers followed him, including Donald Ashwander, Trebor Jay Tichenor, John Arpin, William Bolcom and William Albright.

  The 1970s revival was driven by a specific string of events. In 1971, the pianist Joshua Rifkin released a compilation of Joplin's work that earned a Grammy nomination. Two years later, the New England Ragtime Ensemble recorded The Red Back Book, a set of Joplin rags in period orchestrations edited by the conservatory's president, Gunther Schuller. The recording won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance and was named Billboard's Top Classical Album of 1974. That same year, the New York Public Library published a two-volume set of Joplin's collected works, renewing interest among musicians and prompting new stagings of his opera. The film The Sting, released in 1973, carried Joplin's music to the widest audience yet. Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement of Joplin's 1902 rag "The Entertainer" won an Academy Award and reached No. 3 on the American charts on the 18th of May, 1974. Specialist publications followed the wave of interest, including The Ragtime Review, The Rag Times, and The Mississippi Rag. Ragtime's pull, it turned out, had never really stopped crossing the Atlantic.

• 8. Ragtime Crosses the Atlantic

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  European classical music likely had its first contact with ragtime at the 1900 Paris Exposition, one stop on John Philip Sousa's European tour. Antonín Dvořák became the first notable classical composer to take the style seriously. Claude Debussy went further, working ragtime idioms into three piano pieces, most famously "Golliwog's Cake Walk" from his 1908 suite Children's Corner, and later returned to the style in two preludes, "Minstrels" in 1910 and "General Lavine-eccentric", inspired by a circus clown at the Médrano, in 1913.

  Erik Satie and fellow members of the Paris group known as Les Six, including Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud, made no secret of their own enthusiasm. Satie's 1917 ballet Parade carried the subtitle Ragtime du Paquebot, and in 1904, two years after the American cakewalk had become fashionable in Paris, he wrote two rags of his own, "La Diva de l'empire" and "Piccadilly." The first was composed for the singer Paulette Darty and originally titled Stand-Walk Marche; the second, initially called The Transatlantique, told the story of a wealthy American heir sailing to Europe to trade his fortune for an aristocratic title. Milhaud absorbed the same influence into his ballets Le Boeuf sur le Toit and La Création du Monde after a trip to Harlem in 1922, while Honegger carried it into orchestral works including Pacific 231 and a concertino for piano and orchestra. Igor Stravinsky added his own contribution in 1918 and 1919, folding a rag into his theatre piece L'Histoire du soldat and then composing a solo piano work titled Piano-Rag-Music.

  E. L. Doctorow's novel reached the screen in 1980, with an original score by Randy Newman, and reached Broadway in 1998 as a musical with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, ragtime's cultural afterlife still extending forward. In 2025, a new band called AJELITA formed, describing itself on its YouTube channel as a "modern ragtime music project inspired by the golden elegance of the 1930s and reimagined through the lens of art, jazz, and AI-era creativity." That band's arrival showed the style was still finding new voices to carry it forward.