Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  What’s ironic is that these notorious ‘coon songs’ combined their utterly degrading ‘comic’ lyrics with music that owed its rhythmic appeal to the adventurous African-American style of the day. Whether these mass-produced novelty tunes were billed as a cakewalk or a coon song, ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘nigger’, their accompaniment was invariably syncopated in a style that was described as ‘rag’ or ‘ragtime’. So closely were these two elements linked that the pale-skinned African-American songwriter Ben Harney was able to publish a Ragtime Instructor in 1896, in which he claimed to have been ‘the Originator of Ragtime’, though he was merely one of its best-rewarded exploiters.

  As early as 1898, the American magazine The Etude had determined that ragtime ‘is a term applied13 to the peculiar, broken, rhythmic features of the popular “coon song”. It has a powerfully stimulating effect, setting the nerves and muscles tingling32 with excitement. Its esthetic effect is the same as that in the monotonous, recurring rhythmic chant of barbarous races. Unfortunately, the words to which it is allied are usually decidedly vulgar, so that its present great favor is somewhat to be deplored.’ The style having been identified, its moniker was reliably stated to have come from the ragged state of the clothes worn by its earliest black practitioners; or their ragged, self-taught playing, in which – simple creatures as they were assumed to be – each musician would make the same mistakes; or, more technically, the unpredictably ragged nature of the syncopation around which these melodies were built.

  The white audience for coon songs and cakewalk novelties was satisfied by these explanations, and relished the intoxicating effect of the rhythms. To serious black composers, meanwhile, the equation of ragtime and coon songs was ‘a libellous insult14’, said the Negro Music Journal. ‘The typical Negro would blush to own acquaintance with the vicious trash put forth under Ethiopian titles.’ They maintained that the title of ‘ragtime’ should be reserved for a class of composition that has since been dubbed ‘classic ragtime’. It was, inevitably, infiltrated by white imitators, and handled by white publishers. But at its finest, this ‘ragtime’ tradition was intended to provide not just popular entertainment, but an aesthetic experience comparable to the pinnacles of ‘serious’ European composition.

  The authors and publishers15 … have succeeded in illustrating for the first time the absolute theory of the now famous ‘RAG-TIME’ music, which originated with the Negroes and is characteristic of their people. The Negroe in playing the piano, strikes the keys with the same time and measure that he taps the floor with his heels and toes in dancing, thereby obtaining a peculiarly accented time effect which he terms ‘RAG-TIME’.

  Introduction to the sheet music of ‘Syncopated Sandy’, 1897

  ‘Description of Louisiana Niggers Dancing’ was the explanation given to those few who, in 1897, purchased the first instrumental rag to be published as a music sheet: Theodore Northrup’s ‘Louisiana Rag’. More than 300 similar compositions followed over the next twenty-five years, with titles that were alluring (‘The Fascinator’, ‘The Peach’), comic (‘Car-Balick-Acid Rag-Time’, ‘Who Let the Cows Out’), racially demeaning (‘Pickaninny Capers’, ‘Jungle Time’) and suggestive (‘A Tennessee Tantalizer’ and ‘St Louis Tickle’, for whistling which young men might be slapped in the face or even jailed in the state of Missouri, so carnal were the words that had become attached to it).

  To untrained ears, these rags, regardless of their associations, can sound like a random collection of piano themes. But the ‘classic ragtime’ composition was carefully structured. It contained four (or occasionally three) discrete musical sections, each of sixteen bars’ duration. These sixteen bars could be divided again: the first eight bars introducing a theme, but leaving it hanging; the second returning to it, with variations that would ‘resolve’ the theme (musically and emotionally). In addition, rags would often begin with a four-bar introduction, and similar passages (the ‘vamp’) might allow the cunning composer to move from one melodic section to the next.

  By comparison with, for example, symphonic form, the rag was a simplistic medium. Alongside the popular songs with which the public was most familiar, however, rags appeared much more artful, in every sense of the word: they were crafted, and contrived. ‘After the Ball’, the song sensation of 1891, had followed each individual verse (we’ll call it the ‘A’ section) with a repeated refrain (‘B’). Its structure could therefore be broken down like this: A1; B; A2; B; A3; B. So predictable was this format that the listener would scarcely notice it – any more than the pop fan of the 1960s would be surprised to hear a song that followed the then-standard structure of two verses, a chorus, a ‘middle eight’, another chorus, a final verse and then a chorus to provide a rousing climax.

  Charles K. Harris had insisted that it was the refrain that sold the song, differentiating the ‘hit’ from the rabble. ‘Coon songs’, regardless of their supposed links to ragtime, adhered to his rules, with an instantly identifiable chorus. ‘Classic ragtime’ compositions, however, eschewed such reliance on a single hook. Take the example of Scott Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’, which follows this structure: Introduction; A; A; B; B; A; A; C; C; vamp; D; D. Midway through the composition, the listener could be forgiven for imagining that the ‘A’ section was the refrain, or hook; but after its fourth appearance, which is where an orthodox popular song might have finished, the ‘A’ is jettisoned, and two entirely different themes are introduced, connected almost imperceptibly by a four-bar vamp.

  Ragtime was clearly no refuge for those who lacked a gift for melody. Each composition contained sufficient ideas to propel several popular songs, and the composer frequently scored minute variations on his themes as the piece progressed, to deepen the subtlety. In addition, ragtime musicians would often improvise their own revisions to a published score, to the disgust of composers who believed that their work should be handled with the same reverence that would be paid to a Bach concerto. Rags were written on the piano, and for the piano. The more ‘serious’ the composer and his ambitions, the more carefully he intended his work to be performed. John Stark, the publisher of Scott Joplin’s work, stated baldly that the rags he handled ‘cannot be interpreted at sight16. They must be studied and practised slowly, and never played fast at any time.’ This instruction would often be ignored by subsequent generations.

  Perhaps the most famous rag of the age was Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ (1899), for which John Stark awarded Scott Joplin the rare honour of a 1c royalty on each music sheet. A decade later Stark was able to boast that half a million copies had been purchased. Based in Sedalia, Mississippi, Stark amassed a cabal of talented composers around him. He was not only a perceptive and (for the time) non-exploitative businessman, but also arguably the first great entrepreneur of the popular music age – the precursor of Andrew Loog Oldham, Malcolm McLaren and all those non-composing geniuses who turned hyperbole into an art form. Like McLaren, he was a visionary who shaped his clients to his vision; like Oldham, he was a natural ad man, ready to pen purple poems or playlets in his advertising copy. One goal was beyond even Stark’s grasp: translating ragtime piano into a commercially viable form of recorded sound. The problem was not economic or artistic, but technical. So primitive were the recording techniques of the period that many musical sounds, including the female voice, the large instrumental ensemble, and the piano, could not be reproduced on disc with any hope of fidelity. Familiar though ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ was in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was not recorded in its primal form, as a piano piece, until 1923.

  This was a serendipitous moment for the purveyors of a musical instrument that might have been designed for ragtime (and vice versa): the player piano. Often known as the ‘Pianola’ in the same way that a vacuum cleaner is called a ‘Hoover’, the instrument resembled an orthodox piano, but issued music automatically as a roll of paper (or occasionally metal) was passed through it, having been pre-punched with the appropriate pattern to produce a tune. Manu
facturers pandered to their customers’ vanity by accentuating the skill that was required to control the tempo of the ‘performance’ – ‘Pianola playing is real playing17’, one boasted – and many models allowed the ‘pianist’ to vary the volume, sustain notes, and masquerade as a musical artist. What is irrefutable is that a piano roll could bring the sound of a professional musician to everyman’s parlour, for close study of the work or pure listening pleasure. Thousands of different tunes were translated into piano rolls before the machine lost its commercial standing after the Great Depression of 1929: everything from the most complex classical sonatas to the most banal and ephemeral of Tin Pan Alley songs. In the case of ragtime, many rolls were ‘played’ by the composer himself, on to a keyboard that cut the holes in the master roll. Trained assistants were required to correct any errors that might have arisen, or to add flourishes and grace notes beyond the capability of human hands.

  The incompatibility of piano and phonograph did not preclude the recording of rag tunes in the 1890s and 1900s. Banjo player Vess Ossman not only accompanied vaudeville star Len Spencer on such choice offerings as ‘A Hot Time in the Old Town’, but was spotlighted, with light orchestral support, on a series of ragtime tunes – including a gallop through Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, which must have exasperated its composer with its stubborn refusal to follow the correct tempo.

  If the fluency of Ossman’s banjo-picking could be equated to the manual dexterity of the expert piano player, the other prime outlet for rags depended on an entirely different skill: that of the arranger. By 1900, America was home to an estimated 10,000 brass bands. Their repertoire was50a dominated by marches, but it could span the musical spectrum from high art to novelty tunes; and their audience quickly grew to relish the rhythmic excitement and sonic propulsion of ragtime in brass. The dominant bandleader of the era was John Philip Sousa. He composed more than a hundred marches, among them ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and ‘The Liberty Bell’ (latterly the theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus). As the conductor of the United States Marine Band until 1892, he was responsible for the most popular recording to come from the industry’s baptismal months: ‘Semper Fidelis’ (1890).

  When he assembled his own band two years later, Sousa struggled with the symbols of modernity. He despised what he called ‘canned music’, and allowed his trombonist and arranger, Arthur Pryor, to conduct the Sousa band in his stead when they were called upon to record. Pryor also introduced Sousa’s ensemble to syncopation, and it was his arrangements of cakewalk and ragtime tunes that became the highlights of the band’s public appearances. So much in demand were these contemporary offerings that Sousa learned to hold them back until after the intermission, to ensure that his audience would not depart before the more ‘serious’ items in his repertoire – operatic themes and classical overtures – could be aired.

  Sousa was not alone in his reticence to enter fully into the commercial spirit of the age. Like Sir Arthur Sullivan in London, Scott Joplin – widely regarded as the most elegant composer of the piano rag, although his own pianistic skills were mediocre – was not content to master a popular idiom. In his sights was a higher summit: nothing less than the first ragtime opera. He had learned his trade in bordellos, and married a brothel-keeper; in his youth, he contracted the syphilis that would eventually rob him of the ability to play the piano, and even to speak, before claiming his life at the age of 49. An introvert adrift in a wild man’s milieu, he escaped the rowdy clubs of Sedalia in his 30s. In New York, his writing gathered sophistication, but lost its connection with common taste. His compositions became cloaked in significance, like the ‘Wall Street Rag’ in which he portrayed the power of music to dispel the worries of stockbrokers. Other, less talented men now commanded the marketplace.

  Joplin’s initial attempt at an opera was staged briefly, then forgotten, and finally lost when he had to skip out on his landlord, who was demanding backdated rent. In New York, he assembled the score for what he intended as his masterpiece: Treemonisha. But nobody would bankroll either its publication or its performance; and his efforts to achieve these aims ended in debilitating failure. A year after the ragged bones of Treemonisha received their first inadequate airing, he was consigned to an asylum as his illness took hold. After his death, his wife tantalised potential bidders with tales of suitcases stuffed with unpublished manuscripts, but when she too had gone, thirty-three years after Joplin, all the papers had vanished. Scott Joplin suffered the bittersweet agony of being adored for something he could do almost without effort, and scorned for daring to extend himself. Many others to come – Stan Kenton and Artie Shaw, Joni Mitchell and Elvis Costello – would likewise find themselves stretched between the demands of their audience and the irresistible tug of their creativity.

  There were more comfortable ways for a black man to move through the golden years of ragtime. Selling themselves as ‘The REAL Coons’, dancer George Walker and singer Bert Williams were able to infiltrate the upper echelons of the vaudeville circuit. They came to personify the cakewalk for white New Yorkers, and charmed them with Williams’s original ragtime songs. They even carried the cakewalk to Britain, where the novelty value of their appearance was reinforced by their grandiose billing as ‘the Tobasco Senegambians’. Their willingness to caricature themselves tarnished their reputation among their own race, while Walker gradually exhausted himself in his efforts to secure more humane conditions and fairer wages for African-American performers. Williams soldiered on alone, writing and recording comic songs and ballads, the most enduring of which was ‘Nobody’ (1906). In his lugubrious voice and lazy, self-assured phrasing, it’s possible to hear the premature echoes of later black artists who would employ street smarts, humour and savage intelligence to enchant a potentially hostile white audience – Chuck Berry, to name the most obvious example. There is a clear line of descent from Bert Williams’s sly drawl on ‘He’s a Cousin of Mine’ (1907) to the equally knowing but browbeaten narrators of the Coasters’ vignettes of African-American urban life in the 1950s. Sadly, this pre-modernist died of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of 47, three years short of the technological innovations that would have enabled future generations to appreciate his talent.

  These silly dances are physically18 bad as well as morally bad. The turkey trot, the bunny hug, the tango and all other dances of the ragtime species are the cause of poor figures, while they also cause deformities. The positions of the hips throw them into all sorts of attitudes, and thereby encourage superfluous flesh, as well as displacing the internal organs. They throw the whole body out of poise. The moral is: if you wish to have a good figure, don’t tango, and refrain from ragtime dances. Ragtime and tango dances would demoralise the figure of a Greek goddess, and transform her to the shape of a sack of potatoes.

  American doctor Maude Dunn on ‘Englishwomen’, 1914

  To imitate a grizzly bear19 or a turkey cock – that is comic, grotesque if you like, but beautiful? – never! They are not dances for any young girl to dance. They are, to put it frankly, provocative dances. They are the outcome of the present-day need for excitement, like telephone, car, photography, cinemas. We are becoming incapable of subtle sensations. We need excitement.

  Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, 1913

  So accustomed were white audiences of the music hall and vaudeville to minstrel routines and blackface comics that they rarely expressed qualms about the appearance on stage of Bert Williams, any more than they objected to a white man billing himself ‘The Famous Chocolate-Coloured Coon’, as did G. H. Elliott. Complaints on racial grounds would only surface when black performers no longer agreed to caricature their race. What aroused the public’s interest, disquiet and sometimes outrage on the eve of the First World War was the spectacle of a young generation flinging itself around the dance floor to the syncopated pulse of ragtime. Despite frequent suggestions from the press that youth’s enthusiasm for ragtime was about to fade, and that the waltz would soon be reinstated as the natur
al rhythm of the dance-floor, music publishers poured out novelty tunes designed to accompany a bewildering variety of new steps. Within short succession in 1912 and 1913, the formality of the ballroom succumbed to such dangerously exotic exhibitions as the bunny hug, the grizzly bear, the turkey trot, the dog bite, the hitchy-koo, the London lurch, the fish walk and the style that would outlast and eventually encompass them all: the foxtrot. Some emerged from backstreet bars in Chicago or Harlem; others were the invention of songwriters or publishers in New York or London.

  No longer did young men and women flit from one partner to the next to avoid the slightest hint of immorality. Now they were encouraged to pair up for the evening, and even press their bodies tight in a manner that would previously have been reserved for married couples, and then only in the privacy of their homes. The Manhattan editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal was so appalled to discover that his female typists were devoting their lunch hours to ragtime dancing that he fired fifteen offenders on the spot.

  None of the so-called ‘ragtime’ dances was as controversial as the tango. It had arrived in France around 1900, infiltrating both Paris high society and the brothels of Marseilles. Even a nation that had withstood and accommodated the fleshy revelations of the can-can chose to be appalled by this carnal innovation. ‘The tango is a pseudo-dance20 that should be censored!’, one critic railed. ‘It is truly impossible to describe with precision what one is seeing in Paris. However it could be said that the tango resembles a double belly-dance, where lasciviousness is accented through exaggerated contortions. One believes oneself to be watching a Mahometan couple under the effects of opium.’ So potent was its name that ‘tango’ was soon used to describe every dance of exotic origin.