Clyde McCoy brings the Sugar Blues

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 1974. No, not to the ragtime festival this time but to a grand ball at the local Ramada Inn featuring one of the last of the big bands to still be led by its namesake. Clyde McCoy and his Orchestra brought “Sugar Blues” to Sedalia along with his Wah-wah trumpet, and for one night that small town on the Prairie pretended it was a big city. The community was getting into the oldies after all the ragtime performers had enthused them with their syncopations that summer. The Symphony Society in particular, under the leadership of Abe Rosenthal, was very excited and had invited Max Morath back for his “Ragtime Years” program to open their season just two weeks after the ball. Now while Clyde and the band is warming up I’ll explain about the venerable Sedalia Symphony Society which is still an active and vital cultural entity there in the Queen City of the Prairie. You see, Abe had been asked way back in 1935 by the Helen G. Steele Music Club ladies to form the group and it has been the second oldest continuously performing orchestra of its size West of the Mississippi, only bowing to St. Louis as the oldest. It was Abe who had listened to Brun Campbell back in the 1940’s and had his Men’s Choral Club perform a Scott Joplin concert and pos
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Larry Melton was a founder of the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in 1974 and the Sedalia Ragtime Archive in 1976. He was a Sedalia Chamber of Commerce manager before moving on to Union, Missouri where he is currently helping to conserve the Ragtime collection of the Sedalia Heritage Foundation. Write him at [email protected].

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