Joplin aimed to create
a body of serious American music in the ragtime style, but even if the
form could have borne the weight of Joplin?s ambition for it, he was
doomed to disappointment. He worked on ballets and operas, but had little
success; he died in a mental hospital in 1917. His opera
Treemonisha
was produced in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1973, and a recording was made;
it received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1976. That the Pulitzer committee
gave this bouncy pastiche a prize it would not give to Duke Ellington
while he was alive is unfortunate, but Joplin?s picture on a US postage
stamp in 1983 was appropriate: his rags will live for ever.
Other rag composers whose
work is often considered equal and sometimes superior to Joplin?s include
Tom Turpin, James Scott, Eubie Blake and Luckey Roberts, all of whom
were black, and white composers Joseph Lamb (a close friend of Joplin,
for whom he played part of
Treemonisha
in 1908), George Botsford,
Charles L. Johnson and Percy Wenrich. Artie Matthews wrote fine rags,
worked for Stark as an arranger and was later one of the first to publish
songs with the word ?blues? in the title; his ?Weary Blues? became a
jazz classic. Women also wrote fine rags, the most prolific being May
Aufderheide and Irene Giblin, both white. Prominent banjo players apart
from Ossman included Fred Van Eps, father of jazz guitarist George Van
Eps.
When Douglas Gilbert published
Lost Chord
, a history of American popular music, in 1942, he
thought that Ben Harney was the greatest of ragtime artists, and possibly
the inventor of the genre. In fact, it was Harney who brought ragtime
to New York, where he was billed at Tony Pastor?s theatre as the ?Inventor
of Ragtime?, in the same year he published his instruction book. He
wrote the hit songs ?You?ve Been a Good Old Wagon but You?ve Done Broke
Down? and ?Mr Johnson, Turn Me Loose? (1895-6). The former especially
has survived, possibly in variants: the Bessie Smith song of that title
(recorded in 1925) is credited to John Henry, a pseudonym of Perry Bradford,
and its ownership has changed hands since then. (At the turn of the
century ?Mr Johnson? was black argot for a policeman.) It is not clear
from most books on the subject whether or not Harney was black; Eubie
Blake stated most definitely that he was. In any case, we cannot tell
from the sheet music how he played his own songs: it was edited by somebody
else, and the notation is old-fashioned.
It was not so much the
rhythmic pattern of ragtime in each bar which distinguished it from
other musics, but the fact that it was tied across to the next bar,
and that the next note of the melody (in the treble clef) was not supposed
to be struck on the first beat of the second bar: this is what made
the melody syncopated. By this definition, as far as popular songs were
concerned, a great many ragtime songs (including Harney?s) were not
ragtime at all, but, as with ?jazz? and ?rock? in the future, the term
?ragtime? was widely appropriated. Classical instrumental and operatic
pieces were ?ragged? (played in a syncopated way); it seemed that almost
any uptempo song could be called ragtime: so Irving Berlin became the
most famous ragtime composer of all, thanks to ?Alexander?s Ragtime
Band? (1911), though Berlin is said to have confessed that he did not
know what ragtime was.
Mama Lou (mentioned in
the last chapter) was playing and singing ?There?ll Be a Hot Time in
the Old Town Tonight? and ?Who Stole the Lock on the Henhouse Door?,
as well as ?Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay?, in St Louis. (The first of these,
with cleaned-up lyrics, became a marching song in the Spanish-American
War.) Two enormously popular songs forever described as ragtime, despite
their lack of technical qualifications, are ?Hello! Ma Baby? (1899),
by Joseph E. Howard, and ?Bill Bailey, Won?t You Please Come Home? (1902),
by Hughie Cannon. These and many others, however, were also coon songs,
the black-face vaudeville genre which was already established when ragtime
came along. It was the combination of ragtime and coon songs (probably
the same thing to the public of the 1890s) that led to the mainstream
pop songs of the next century.
One of the first coon hits
was ?New Coon in Town? (1883) by J. S. Putnam. The singers were called
coon shouters, and included May Irwin, who was famous for the ?Bully
Song? and Harney?s ?Mr Johnson, Turn Me Loose?. The biggest coon hit
was Ernest Hogan?s ?All Coons Look Alike to Me? (1896), about a woman
rejecting her lover for another man with more money. While a great many
writers of coon songs and other hits of the era were Irish, Hogan was
black. His real name was Reuben Crowder, and he began his show business
career as a child in
Uncle Tom?s Cabin
in 1876. (The play was
first staged in 1852, before the book was published, but it was well
over twenty years before a producer had enough nerve to use ?real Negroes?.)
Not only did ?coon? soon
become an obnoxious epithet, but Hogan?s title became an obnoxious catchphrase;
Hogan is said to have regretted his greatest success. In the original
version of the ?Bully Song? Mama Lou herself sang ?I?m a Tennessee nigger
and I don?t allow / No red-eyed river roustabout with me to raise a
row?. Ethnic stereotypes of all kinds were taken for granted by a polyglot
nation that still attracted millions of immigrants each year, and the
institutionalization of racism was less complete in the North than in
the South. Later in the twentieth century ethnic humour would be one
of the casualties of racism.
Other performers who were
described as ragtime singers or coon shouters were Dolly Connolly, Billy
Murray, Bert Williams, Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson, all very different.
Connolly was married to rag composer Percy Wenrich; her hit records
in 1911-12 included ?Waiting for the Robert E. Lee? (by Lewis F. Muir).
The southern or ?Dixie-land? flavour of such songs helped them into
the ragtime category. Billy Murray was one of the best-known stars in
the history of recording; his ?The Grand Old Rag? (1906, by George M.
Cohan, and soon retitled ?You?re a Grand Old Flag?) was said to be the
biggest hit in Victor?s first decade.
Bert Williams was born
in the West Indies and became the first and most successful black performer
in vaudeville and then on Broadway, with his partner George Walker;
in 1903 they were the stars of the first full-length musical show to
be written and performed by blacks on Broadway,
In Dahomey
. Williams
had a streak of melancholy; W. C. Fields described him as ?the funniest
man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew?. In his personal life
he had middle class tastes and aspirations, but he had to wear blackface
during his entire career as a singer, dancer and comedian. Later, when
he became a star of the Ziegfeld Follies, he had to be defended against
the racism of fellow performers by the producer. On one occasion, when
Williams and his wife went to visit the Ziegfelds at home, a doorman
refused to admit them until Ziegfeld threatened to move out of the building.
Williams made two short silent films, which had to be withdrawn; racist
reaction was violent when they were shown, though he was an accepted
star on the stage. His most famous number was ?Nobody?, a sort of half-sung,
half-spoken bit of pathos which he recorded twice (reworked by Ry Cooder
on his
Jazz
album in 1978). He made dozens of hit recordings
from 1902, and was immortalized by Duke Ellington in ?A Portrait of
Bert Williams? in 1940.
Sophie Tucker was billed
as a coon shouter early in her long career, but made no blackface appearances
after 1911, by which time she was a top performer. She sang ?I?m the
Last of the Red Hot Mamas? in a film in 1929, and that became her billing.
Always plump and not very pretty, she astonished audiences with her
costumes and her powerful stage presence, and a repertory much of which
could not be broadcast. Born in 1884 somewhere between Russia and Poland
while her family escaped from tsarist pogroms, she later played the
wife of the American ambassador to the Soviet Union in a Broadway musical.
At her first Royal Command Performance in London in 1934 she greeted
King George V with ?Hiya, King!? She was still performing three years
before she died in 1966. Her best-known songs were ?Some of These Days?,
written by Shelton Brooks, who also wrote ?Darktown Strutters? Ball?,
about Chicago?s State Street when the black culture scene was located
near the Loop, and ?My Yiddishe Mama?, by Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack,
who also wrote ?Cheatin? on Me?, later a hit for Jimmie Lunceford. (Yellen
co-wrote ?Ain?t She Sweet?? and ?Happy Days Are Here Again?.) Tucker
recorded ?My Yiddishe Mama? in 1928, in English on one side of the record
and Yiddish on the other, and sold a million copies.
Al Jolson billed himself
as ?The World?s Greatest Entertainer?, not without justification: he
was the biggest star vaudeville ever had. Born Asa Yoelson in Russia
in 1886, he was an inspiration to many later artists, such as Bing Crosby,
not for his style (he milked blackface for sentimentality decades after
everyone else had dropped it), but for his professionalism and dedication
to pleasing his audience. His first used his catch-phrase ?You ain?t
heard nothin? yet!? when he followed Caruso at a benefit in 1918.
We have already seen that
Jolson was the best example of a successful artist who was given co-writing
credit from Tin Pan Alley in return for singing a song. Tucker was first
to sing ?When The Red Red Robin Goes Bob Bob Bobbin? Along?, but it
was identified with Jolson. He made the first talking film, The Jazz
Singer, in 1927. (He was no jazz singer, and the film, though a sensation,
was only partly a ?talkie?.) He sang George Gershwin?s ?Swanee?, ?My
Mammy?, by Sam Lewis, Joe Young and Walter Donaldson, and ?Sonny Boy?
in blackface and white gloves, and typically on one knee. ?Sonny Boy?
was written by one of the most successful songwriting teams of all time,
DeSylva, Brown and Henderson, as a joke. When they sent it n) Jolson,
to their astonishment he liked it, and sang it along with ?There?s a
Rainbow ?Round My Shoulder? in the 1928 film
The Singing Fool
.