Music: King of the Ragtimers

The syncopated cakewalking craze called ragtime was born just before the turn of the 20th Century and died in the blaze of jazz with World War I. To most jazz fans of today, it sounds like something still on the stalk. To bearded Jazz Pedant Rudi (Shining Trumpets) Blesh and Harriet Janis, it is “music of enduring worth, revolutionary in concept and development.” In a rambling, diffuse, but “true story of an American music” published last week under the title They All Played Ragtime (Knopf; $4), Co-Authors Blesh and Janis lovingly tell the tale of “a song that came from the people and then got lost.”

Their hero is a man whom even Jazz Pianist-Composer Ferdinand (“Jelly-Roll”) Morton, a notoriously uncharitable critic, acknowledged as “the greatest ragtime writer that ever lived.” In a book packed with the high-sounding names of old ragtime wizards and composers (“Blind Boone,” “Jack the Bear,” “One-Leg Shadow”), a quiet-mannered, softspoken, scholarly little man stands out above them all: Scott Joplin, the composer of Maple Leaf Rag.

Like a lot of other ragtimers, Texas-born Scott Joplin served his time rocking a piano in that cradle of jazz, the sporting house. But unlike flamboyant, razor-handy Jelly Roll Morton, Joplin was, as one old friend recalls, the kind of man who “never hurt anybody. A kitten could knock him down. He wasn’t much socially, but most everyone had a lot of respect for Scott because he never threw himself away.”

When his Maple Leaf Rag (1899) made him independent, he quit the honky-tonk circuit and left Sedalia, Mo., a town revered by ragtimers as New Orleans is by the jazzbos, and set himself up as a respectable teacher in St. Louis. He turned out rags by the dozens (including Peacherine Rag and The Easy Winners), and even six serious etudes to help “amateur players” learn how to keep that steady beat with the left hand while syncopating off the beat with the right. His biggest ambition was to compose a ragtime opera. Before he died in 1917, he had written two (A Guest of Honor, Treemonisha) and a folk ballet. Each had one public performance.

Nowadays, ragtime is almost forgotten, except for the occasional rippling of Nola or Piano Roll Blues from a jukebox. But it is worth remembering, say Authors Blesh and Janis, as “a part of [America’s] folk-song and a part of our art.”