Blowing Off The Dust

Making new friends and learning more about older acquaintances is one of the many rewards of being part of the on-line ragtime community. I am

They All Played Ragtime (Alfred A. Knopf, Ltd., 1950) by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis is a wonderful story of our ragtime heritage. There have

Each year as a Scott Joplin anniversary rolls around, I get to pondering the composer’s tragic life and the lack of acclaim he received while

Imagine the privilege of sitting a few rows behind Eubie Blake on the night of January 28, 1972, and watching his whole body move to

I am often asked about my background in music, what instruments I play, and when I first became interested. My flippant response is that I

Just when I was becoming accustomed to getting my ragtime music solely from the Internet and recordings, I had a pleasant surprise. Virginia Tichenor emailed

This month, I fear I will be rambling even more than usual. So many things rattle around in my head these days, so I’ll just

I have recently been blowing the dust off nearly 50 years of photos and ephemera from the many annual trips my wife and I took

The Age of Sound I recently discovered that the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry has made the final selections for it’s now completed “500

I spend a lot of time blowing the dust off of old newspaper clippings, especially articles about the ragtime festivals in Sedalia over the years.

No dusting off this month, only fresh anecdotes and delightful reminiscences. I managed to spend a week at the 38th Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in

This month I am going to use this tiny Sedalia newspaper snippet from 1902 to discuss some thoughts on research and then segue to writing

Recently, letters written between 1945 and 1951 by S. Brunson Campbell (Scott Joplin’s white pupil in Sedalia in the late 1890s) were made public for

A fond memory from the ragtime revival years of the early 1970s was a trip to Texarkana, a community which famously straddles the border between

Throughout mid-February, I was suitably entertained watching the Winter Olympics. I thoroughly enjoy the amazing feats of skill, endurance, agility and downright courage the athletes

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” This line, credited to Andy Warhol from a Stockholm exhibit catalog in 1968, has gone

I was visiting recently with a friend about angels. Not the Gabriel types, with trumpets blaring, or the ones like Clarence waiting to get their

Among the treasures of the Sedalia Ragtime Archive are sections of G. Thomas Ireland’s old clarinets. Though Sedalia ragtime is usually associated with Scott Joplin,

Fred Hoeptner’s paper on the origin and use of the term “ragtime” delivered at last Summer’s Joplin Festival in Sedalia has had me thinking about

Perceptions As I was wandering the Internet this month for ragtime news, something Jeanie Wright wrote on her Facebook page caught my attention. When asked

Haze of Memory Not very much happened of ragtime interest in Sedalia in the years after World War I. The bustling town moseyed along, growing