From “Maple Leaf Rag” by Vess Ossman to “St. Louis Rag” by Arthur Pryor

 

(In Which Ragtime Bursts Out Of The Brothel Scene To Become The First Major Pop Craze)

There wasn’t a lot of backing music in most of the non-marching band music that I’ve covered so far – even if there was somebody playing in the studio/laboratory the recording technology was too primitive to pick it up – but what little there was sounded like a vague approximation of the genre known as ragtime.

Ragtime was everywhere in the 1890s, as evidenced by the hit song “I’m Definitely Living A Ragtime Life,” in which the narrator tells us that they have a ragtime dog and a ragtime cat, a ragtime piano in their ragtime flat, they wear ragtime clothes from their hat to their shoes, they read a paper called the ”Ragtime News.”

“I’m Definitely Living A Ragtime Life” was a ragtime hit in 1900 by which time the word – like so many pop culture words – had virtually lost whatever meaning it may have once possessed. No longer just a style of music, ragtime was a lifestyle.

But originally – only a couple of years before – ragtime had been a style of music. A fast-paced, pep-filled style of music. Infinitely catchy, full of constantly moving pieces, and infamously impossible to play. Ragtime gradually bubbled up into public consciousness over the course of the 1890s, particularly that cohort of the public who liked to visit brothels. Which – as we have demonstrated - appears to have been a remarkably large component of the male population.

Now every brothel needed its mood music, and no music said sex - no music provided the pounding rhythm of sex - quite like ragtime.*  But ragtime didn’t really break out of the brothel ghetto and enter mainstream public consciousness until it became the soundtrack to the Chicago World Fair. Asyou’ve no doubt noticed by now, everything in 1890s popular culture revolvedaround the Chicago World Fair.

Or maybe that should be the soundtrack outside of the Chicago World Fair. For whilst Sousa’s Band playing “After The Ball” over and over again was all you could hear inside the fair, every itinerant performer in the Mid-West was working outside. Outside the gates playing to ticket holders wandering in and out, before playing in the saloons, bars and brothels at night. One of those performers was Scott Joplin.

Scott Joplin had been born and raised in Texarkana, Texas, before spending his youth travelling from town to town, from salon to salon, from brothel to brothel, throughout the Indian territories, throughout the Great Plains, very frequently ending up in St Louis, Missouri. And now he had ended up in Chicago, in time for the World Fair.

Exactly what Scott was doing at the World Fair is unclear – being a poor Black man he certainly wouldn’t have been allowed in – some sources say he was leading a vocal quartet, some say he was playing the cornet. Some say that vocal quartet was just called that, but it actually had eight members. It’s not impossible of course that these are all true. It’s also unclear whether Scott was already playing ragtime, or whether – like everyone else – the Chicago World Fair was where Scott first heard the music, being played by fellow Black musicians likewise travelling around from town to town, salon to salon, brothel to brothel.

Nobody knows who “invented” ragtime. To be fair nobody did. Ragtime wasn’t the sort of music that is “invented.” No music is. It just sort of evolved. Scott Joplin may be the most important figure in ragtime history, but there were hundreds of other Black piano players playing in hundreds of other saloons and brothels across the mid-West, all pounding out a similarly rowdy noise. And a large number of them had turned up in Chicago, to play for the 30 million World Fair ticketholders looking for something to do.

Some of those 30 million World Fair ticketholders were Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, and those Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths began to incorporate ragtime rhythms into their Tin Pan Alley tunes. Or at least they’d try to. They didn’t really know what they were doing, but for the next decade or so, “ragtime” rhythms would be just about as inescapable as “After The Ball.” Most of those songs would be referred to by another genre name, but we’ll get to that…

Meanwhile, Scott Joplin went back to Missouri, spending his nights playing in a brothel, spending his days learning music theory at George R. Smith College. Learning musical concepts such as counterpoint. Learning skills such as how to write the rowdy noise he was playing down on paper, not a skill that the majority of ragtime pianists possessed. He also became a music teacher.

Scott didn’t settle down in St. Louis however, he settled down in Sedalia, which – being smack-bang in the middle of Missouri – was to Missouri what St. Louis was to the United States. Sedalia was possibly even more of a party town than St Louis, with such a high number of brothels per capita that even St. Louis residents were impressed/appalled. When a St Louis newspaper referred to Sedalia as a “Sodom and Gomorrah” – not just Sodom or Gomorrah, but the sum of them both together! – you know that the place was rough.

One particularly rough establishment was the Maple Leaf Club - where Scott Joplin provided piano-accompaniment for cake-walking champion Tony Williams’ prance-dance - a gentleman’s club in which, if the frequency with which its members found themselves in jail is anything to go by, the members were anything but gentlemen. The Maple Leaf Club was the scene of occasional prize fights, regular instances of knife fights amongst the female employees, and at one point a customer trying to shoot another with a loaded cane. There was, if nothing else, never a dull moment. No surprise then that the town preachers were constantly be organizing petitions to get the place shutdown. Given that it only lasted for a couple of years, they appear to have been successful.

The Maple Leaf Club was just as action packed as the rag that Scott composed and named after it: “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Similar to one of Sousa’s better marches, “Maple Leaf Rag” comes across less as a single piece of music and more like a medley. One catchy melody, followed immediately by another, then back to the first one again… before leaping, via a key change, into two more catchy melodies! There was always so much going on in Scott Joplin rag. It must have been very distracting for the brothel patrons.

It didn’t take long before “Maple Leaf Rag” became the definitive rag. The one rag that the general public – even the non-brothel attending segments of society, presuming such people even existed – could be guaranteed to hum along to. But it hadn’t been easy for Scott to turn his tune into a hit. After all, he was just a Black music teacher, playing piano in a brothel, in the middle of Missouri.

Luckily Sedalia also had a music-store-owning-music-publisher – John Stark - who thought that “Maple Leaf Rag” was probably brilliant but was hesitant to publish it because he didn’t think that anybody would be able to play it. It was just too complicated and too fast! Also the rhythm was awkward to annotate properly: you couldn’t really write the groove out, you just had to, y’know, feel it. Legend has it that Scott responded that it was easy to play, even a teenage boy could play it. Then went straight out and found a teenage boy who could. Little did John Stark know – although he may have suspected – that Scott had been training that teenage boy for days.

Stark’s hesitance was understandable. If “Maple Leaf Rag” was played by the kinds of customers that usually bought sheet music – the young middle-class ladies of middle America – it would have been played badly. And no doubt it was. Since it would eventually sell one million copies in sheet music form, the challenge of being the first amongst your peer group to master the piece was clearly part of the appeal.

Then there was another setback: John Stark’s building burnt down and most of the copies of “Maple Leaf Rag” with it.

Eventually though “Maple Leaf Rag” was published, the public did their very best to play it, and all sorts of musicians would try their very best to write a rag of their very own. Tom Turpin – full name, Tom Million John Turpin – was one of the first and he didn’t wait very long either.

Waiting was not something that appeared to be in Tom’s nature. He was a very busy man. He owned a saloon in St. Louis. And a theatre. And a gambling house. And he may have been Mama Lou’s pianist during her golden era of bawling out bawdy songs. And still he found time to write his rags - most notably “The St. Louis Rag” – and perform them, playing the piano standing up because he was rather portly and if he sat down his stomach would get in the way.

When “St Louis Rag” was finally recorded in 1904, it would be one of the most exciting recordings of that early era; an admittedly low bar, I know. That recording would be Arthur Pryor, otherwise known as the trombonist in John Sousa’s band.

It will not surprise you to learn that John Sousa hated ragtime. John Sousa was the kind of man who hated everything new, simply on account of its newness. John Sousa famously – as we have already covered – hated phonographs. He hated recording for phonographs. That’s why, whenever Sousa’s Band was lured into the phonograph recording studio, John Sousa himself would be conspicuously missing, having delegated responsibility for such unseemly business practices to Arthur Pryor.

Arthur Pryor was from Missouri, so he had ragtime in his bones. More specifically he was from St. Joseph, a small town right on the other side of Missouri from St. Louis, on the banks of the Missouri River, just north of Kansas City, another city with a booming Black population. So when it came to deciding what tunes the Sousa Band should record, Arthur showed a strong ragtime bias. He also showed a strong bias towards the ragtime that he wrote himself. Arthur wrote “A Coon Band Contest” - I’ve already talked about that one – and he wrote “Southern Hospitality”, the sheet music for which featured the scribbled drawing of a nattily dressed well-to-do Black man welcoming another nattily dressed well-to-do Black man to a party in his log cabin. Arthur really wanted people to believe he had first-hand knowledge of the African American experience (“Southern Hospitality” is a lively 5)

Although the ragtime records of the Sousa Band still sound unmistakably like a marching band, their performances are bright, fun and colourful, if a little awkward and self-conscious. 1900’s “Hu-La Hu-La Cake Walk”, for example, was a playful, jovial affair with lots of wood blocking clomping in the background (“Hu-La Hu-La Cake Walk” is a 4).

By 1902 Arthur Pryor left the Sousa Band to start his own, and – without Sousa there to disapprove – playing rags became increasingly what Arthur’s band were about. This is when Arthur recorded “The St. Louis Rag”, turning it into a no-holds-barred blast! Drums crash all over the joint, horns shoot out rapid-fire sprays of sound!!! BAM-BAM!!!! BAM-BAM!!!! Arthur had finally figured out how to get a marching band to play this stuff!! (Arthur’s version of “St Louis Rag” is an 8)

Then again, the marching band probably wasn’t the most natural fit for ragtime. Since both Scott and Tom wrote and play their rags on a piano, the piano would have been the most logical choice of instrument for a ragtime record. But pianos were difficult to record. They were not loud enough, and also too large; if you placed the funnel down the bass end in order to capture the rhythm, you wouldn’t be able to hear the melody. If you put the funnel up the high end to hear the melody, you wouldn’t be able to hear the bass. Banjos didn’t present this problem. Banjos, what with their twangy plinking and plunking, sounds that were sharp and clear, cut through everything.

Luckily there was a banjo player in New York, perfectly cut out for the job of plinking and plunking the latest ragtime melodies. That man, of course, was Vess Ossman.

Like all the other recorded musicians, Vess Ossman plunked everything that was plonked in front of him. His medleys of tunes from popular musicals were particularly popular, but he also recorded the “William Tell Overture”, “Yankee Doodle” and a particularly odd record called “Cocoanut Dance” in which Berliner appear to have splurged out on an orchestra to play a few seconds of what sounds like an extremely awkward rendition of Wagner’s “Flight Of The Valkyries” for some reason that has never been explained, before Vess starts plonking (“Cocoanut Dance” is a 7). But Vess’ particular skill set, the spectacular nimbleness of his fingers, was uniquely perfect for ragtime. Vess was responsible for some raucous ragtime recordings. “A Coon Band Contest” complete with a ragtime pianist and a comic horn, “A Rag Time Skeddadle”, “Buffalo Rag”, a medley called “Bunch Of Rags”, “Darkie Tickle” - “Tickle” as in “tickle the ivories” – and “An Ethiopian Mardi Gras.”

When it came to being the Banjo King, Vess constantly had to defend his crown from plunkin’ pretenders to the throne. In the 1890s this competition came mostly from Joseph Cullen and William P. Collins, two duetting banjo players, who recorded “Eli Green’s Cake Walk” in 1898. “Eli Green’s Cake Walk” is a relatively simple – and therefore ear-wormy – tune by ragtime standards, which may be why it was such a hit in the sheet music format; something to try your hand at whilst warming up to the challenge of “Maple Leaf Rag.” It was written by Sadie Koninsky, a young white lady from upstate New York, not – one would assume – a hot spot for cakewalks. (Cullen & Collin’s version of “Eli Green’s Cake Walk” is a 4).

In the longer term however, Vess staunchest competition for banjo supremacy came from Fred Van Eps. Fred also built his own banjos. It was a friendly arch-rivalry. Sometimes, if Vess wasn’t available, the phonograph company would call Fred into the studio to record instead… then put Vess’ name on it anyway. Nobody ever seemed to notice the difference.

Listening to Vess’ recordings was an important component of Fred’s musical training. Fred was so obsessed with Vess’ recording that he bought a phonograph purely to listen to them. Given how expensive phonographs were at the time he had to fund the purchase by going back to his hometown – where they’d never seen or heard a phonograph before – and performing demonstrations of it, with the locals all gathered around listening to Vess recordings on those stethoscope tubes.

And then, almost immediately, he used his newly acquired phonograph to make records of his own. Because you could do that. Phonographs worked both ways.

Fred’s initial broadside in the battle of the banjos was a charming but clumsy rendition of “Blaze Away”, an uptempo and vaguely raggy march by Abe Holzmann, who was on a roll at the time with another raggy march called “Smokey Mopes”, thereby combining two moderately derogatory racial terms for the price of one, and which was marketed as being by a “German Composer who Writes American Cakewalk Music.” Vess had recorded a rather sprightly version (Fred’s recording of “Blaze Away” is a 4, Vess’ recording of “Smokey Mopes” is a 7)

Despite the growing competition from Fred – not to forget Cullens and Collins - Vess was very clearly on top of the ragtime banjo plunking pile. He even had a banjo model named after him: The Ossman Special Banjo! He went to London and Paris and played the banjo for the King! He boasted in the press that he was the only banjo player to play in the Royal Squadron!

Although the banjo may not have been quite what Scott and Tom had in mind when they wrote their rags, or played them on their brothel-pianos, it was closer to the ragtime spirit than a great big, often government-accredited, marching band, such as the one – The U.S. Marine Band, the same outfit who had recorded “The Washington Post March” back in 1890, although presumedly most of the musicians had changed - that finally got around to recording a rendition of “Maple Leaf Rag” in – and we are going to have jump forward a tad now – 1907, about a decade after it was first published.** It probably took them much of that decade for everyone to learn how to play the darn thing!

The U.S. Marine Band play it fast. Which is not, I feel required to point out, how it was supposed to be played. Scott was constantly berating people, time and time again, for playing ragtime too fast. The instructions “don’t play this piece too fast, it is never correct to play ragtime too fast” would be printed at the start of the sheet music of virtually every rag he composed. “Maple Leaf Rag” would probably not have been so difficult to play if people hadn’t insisted on playing it as fast as they possibly could. But where is the fun, and where is the challenge, in that?

Whether the U.S. Marine Band are having fun is difficult to tell but they are certainly working hard. Their version of “Maple Leaf Rag” is only two and a half minutes long – which was standard at the time - but by the end of it, The U.S. Marine Band sounded utterly exhausted (The U.S. Marine Band’s version of “Maple Leaf Rag” is a 6)

Suddenly there was a whole rush of renditions, almost as though everyone had been waiting for somebody to prove that “Maple Leaf Rag” was actually possible to play. Vess Ossman had a hit with it. Backed by an orchestra (!) a very fancy backing band for a plunking banjo player, which makes Vess sound like a fully-fledged star (Vess’ version is a 7)

Vess also collaborated with two banjo-playing brothers by the name of Dudley to form the Ossman-Dudley Trio, recording “St. Louis Tickle”, a medley of ragtime tunes that had been composed for the St. Louis Exhibition of 1904 by minstrel troupe manager, Theron C Bennet. Since one of the songs was a direct steal, perhaps “composed” is not quite the right word to describe Theron’s involvement. Perhaps “assembled” is better. “Assembled” out of a whole lot of other bits, at least one of which was stolen.

For Theron had stolen “Funky Butt.”

“Funky Butt” had been written by a mythical figure by the name of Charles “Buddy” Bolden. “Buddy” wasn’t from St Louis at all but from New Orleans. “Buddy” – or so legend tells us – invented jazz. “Buddy” was a free and wild spirit who liked to make it up as he went along. “Buddy” had a super-human ability to play the cornet louder than anyone had ever played the cornet before or would ever again. You could hear “Buddy” playing that thing for blocks! Some say you could hear “Buddy” from ten miles away!!

“Buddy” also drank so much he ended up in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum, thus providing jazz with its first genius to be driven to madness.

“Buddy” left behind one single photo… a photo as blurry as Buddy’s vision after he’d drunk too much at the “Funky Butt”. Because the “Funky Butt” was not only a song – quite possibly the first song ever to feature the word “funky” in its title – but also one of the toughest bars in one of toughest neighbourhoods in one of the toughest cities in America.**** Only a crazy person would be crazy enough to play at a venue like the “Funky Butt.” “Buddy” Bolden was that crazy person.

Now technically, “Funky Butt” was not the bar’s official name. The official name of the “Funky Butt” was the Union Sons Hall. Nobody called it the Union Sons Hall though, because, let’s face it, that’s a boring name. They called it the “Funky Butt” Hall, because of the smell from all the bodies dancing there. The “Funky Butt” Hall also served as a church on Sundays.

Somehow Theron heard “Funky Butt”, he insert it into “St Louis Tickle”, which was, in due course, recorded by the Ossman-Dudley Trio (and it’s a 7)

But no style of music perfectly engineered for the shaking of funky butts can ever be allowed to exist without the media declaring that a backlash is surely not too far away. Opinion pieces proclaiming the inevitable extinction of “ragtime” made for the perfect newspaper column filler on a slow news day. “Ragtime Music Doomed To Extinction” pronounced the “Herald And Review” in Illinois, and I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that the source of this declaration was our friend, John Sousa. John was always good for a pithy and paranoid quote on how everything new was rotten and wrong.

“Ragtime had the dyspepsia or gout long before it died”, John claimed.

“It was overfed by poor nurses. Good ragtime came and half a million imitators sprang up. Then, as a result, people were sickened with the stuff!”

Harsh words from ol’ John, who the newspaper described in the following terms: “no other conductor keeps his finger more closely upon the pulse of popular favour.” This is not the impression I usually get from John.

Black newspaper “The New York Age” picked up the controversy and asked the leading composers of their community for their opinion. Chris Smith pointed out that his rags – “You’re In The Right Church, But The Wrong Pew” and “He’s A Cousin Of Mine”, both of which are coming up soon – were flying off the shelf, but if those tunes are rags then it’s clear that – even amongst Black communities – the word had utterly lost all meaning. It would soon lose even more.

Whose side, you may be wondering, was Scott Joplin on? Possibly surprisingly, Scott may have agreed with Sousa. Scott Joplin may have been the leader of a new musical craze, but he wasn’t satisfied with that. Scott Joplin had a dream. As snooty as Sousa, Scott wanted to write operas. He also tried to differentiate his music from all the other rags that had emerged in his wake, by describing his tunes as “classical ragtime.”

Scott Joplin did finally succeed in writing his opera – “Treemonisha” – all about the value of education, but nobody wanted to publish it. Or perform it. All they wanted from him was rags. To be fair, all anybody wanted from anyone was rags. And increasingly all anyone wanted was a particular type of rag, based on a specific lyrical theme: all anyone wanted was “coon songs.”

*Sigh* It’s time to talk about “coon songs.”

*Except, perhaps, for jig-piano, a kind of proto-ragtime genre that never quite crossed over, never quite broke out of the brothel.

**Rumours persist that Wilbur Sweatman, a Black man that will pop up a few times later on, a man with the freaky talent of being able to play two clarinets at the same time, sometimes even three (!) recorded a version of “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1903, but nobody has ever been able to find a copy.

*** Whilst the white inhabitants of New Orleans had their own red-light district, this neighbourhood – referred to as Back O’Town – took it to the next level. Back O’Town was the red-light districts’ red-light district!