Post 1910-1920-4: Popular Music- Ragtime and the Blues

By the nineteen-teens, Ragtime music had become mainstream popular music. Irvin Berlin, a popular musical composer and composer of tin-pan ally hits, wrote "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911. Listen to this performance by Blues legend Bessie Smith:


At the time that composers were mainstreaming Ragtime music, Blues music was still largely unknown among Americans and was mostly a part of African American culture. In its early days of popularity, the genre was considered lewd, "low class", and unsophisticated in much the same way that Ragtime was originally received. Bessie Smith began performing around 1912 as a part of a traveling company. Below you'll find a performance of one of her most famous hits, "St. Louis Blues". In the clip the song is given fairly specific staging. Notice what image of African Americans is presented by the film makers. Notice how Smith is characterised early in the film.

Smith was known in her day as the Empress of the Blues. This title was earned by her obvious talent and powerful voice (you'll notice that her voice often over powers the sound equipment in this clip). Her flamboyant costuming was also noted by mostly African American audiences, as elegant and visually stunning. Below you'll find a picture of her in one of her show costumes. Note the contrast between her image below and how she was portrayed in the film.

Photo Credit: http://www.flapperjane.com/April%202004/Bessie.htm

Post 1910-1920-3: Vaudeville Theatre

Made popular in the late nineteenth century, Vaudeville Theater was made up of a series of variety acts. The entertainment was cheap and usually involved everything from singing, to trained animals, to comedians. To hear authentic Vaudeville acts, click here.

Below you'll find film of one famous movie star who found his start in vaudeville, Fred Astaire. The number comes from the movie Holiday Inn (1941) and also features Bing Crosby. This scene is also similar to that of Vaudeville staging.




Photo Credit: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www285.pair.com/
scannell/15011.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.celticpanda.com/Vaudeville

Post 1910-1920-2: Silent Film

Below you'll view an early Edison film, the first attempt at syncing sound with moving picture.


While Edison and other film companies avidly experimented with adding sound to motion pictures, film makers pushed the art form of movie making. One famous example is the work of director D.W. Griffith. He is perhaps best known for his production of The Birth of a Nation, a historical drama based on the novel The Clansmen, a celebratory history of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. While Griffith's social views were in line with the view of many in the early 20th century, his film technique introduced nuanced methods of story telling. Below, one of his earlier films, A Corner in Wheat, demonstrates his developing style. In the film a poor farmer clashes with a richer more powerful "wheat king". The social commentary pushes the capability of moving pictures beyond entertainment and novelty and into the realm of social commentary.

Post 1910-1920-1: Scott Joplin: Ragtime and the Cakewalk

The son of a former slave, Joplin worked as an itinerant musician, playing wherever and whenever he could. He gained fame with the 1899 "Maple Leaf Rag, and later was able to support himself as a composer. Joplin's musical success helped to make Ragtime a national craze. Below is a pianola recording of Joplin playing his famous "Maple Leaf Rag".



Ragtime first became popular in the famed red light district of New Orleans, Storyville.Piano players, like Joplin, were often employed in bars and the parlors of brothels to entertain patrons. Eventually, the syncopated rhythms of ragtime moved out of the bawdy dives of Storyville and into the cultural vocabulary of mainstream America as did the dances set to rags such as the cake walk. Cake Walking, a dance style named for dance competitions in which the first prize was a cake, preceded ragtime as a form but, many early rags were in fact cake walks.

Below, is a film circa 1903 of dancers performing a cakewalk. Notice that the first performance features African American dancers while the second features dancers in black face, a form made popular in the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. The end of the clip features all white dancers enjoying a day at the beach...a setting far from the poverty and struggle of one of New Orleans roughest districts.



"There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it. It is my opinion that the colored people of this country have done four things which refute the oft-advanced theory that they are an absolutely inferior race, which demonstrate that they have originality and artistic conception, and, what is more, the power of creating that which can influence and appeal universally. The first two of these are the Uncle Remus stories, collected by Joel Chandler Harris, and the Jubilee songs, to which the Fisk singers made the public and the skilled musicians of both America and Europe listen. The other two are ragtime music and the cake-walk. No one who has traveled can question the world-conquering influence of ragtime, and I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that in Europe the United States is popularly known better by ragtime than by anything else it has produced in a generation. In Paris they call it American music."- James Weldon Johnson