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