Blowing Off The Dust

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

Earlier Festivals in Sedalia As I am writing this, the 37th Annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri, is well under way and by

1983 was a busy year… I note that as the Director of Symposia for the 2017 Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival, Bill Edwards will present

I enjoy working with the ephemera of the Ragtime Archive in Sedalia and, as a diversion, I work with my own accumulation of personal scrapbook

While blowing off the dust this morning, an old newspaper clipping fell out of a scrapbook and it took me back to Sedalia, Missouri in

One of my fondest memories (and there were many) of last summer’s Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia is of meeting Kyle Stark and his

In the month supposedly reserved for New Year resolutions, I prefer to look back forty years to an as yet unrealized resolution from the 1970s.

I’ve been reminded again recently that archival work isn’t all about shuffling old papers and blowing the dust off of old artifacts to conserve them.

I can’t believe that I ever functioned without Internet email, social media, and especially without the benefit of search engines and databases. As someone who

In December it is customary to review the major events of the year but I’m far too off-put by this year’s chaos so I decided

As I was writing last month about the excellent newspapers and newsletters in the fields of jazz and ragtime, I was also reminded of the

I have been reflecting recently with an old friend by email, about all the sources of information we have regarding Ragtime, from learned authorities to