Ragged but Right musicologists Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff carry readers on a rousing roller-coaster ride from carnivals to tent shows to vaudeville as they meticulously trace the origins of jazz in those varied vintage entertainment idioms.
Abbott (who works at the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in New Orleans) and Seroff (from Greenbrier, Tenn.) previously co-authored Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895. That volume dealt with brass bands, banjo and mandolin clubs, male quartets, “jubilee” singers, and theatrical companies. The rise of “authentic” Black minstrelsy, documented in Out of Sight, leads naturally into Ragged but Right, which focuses first on “coon songs.”
In fact Abbott and Seroff are among a rare handful of writers to fully explore the coon song phenomenon and explain its importance in the formation of blues and jazz.
Truth be told, the biggest hits of the ragtime era weren’t Scott Joplin’s stately piano rags. Instead, coon songs such as “Every Race has a Flag But the Coon” and “Coon on the Moon” defined ragtime for the masses. Though such titles may offend modern ears, it’s impossible to investigate black popular entertainment of the 1890s without directly confronting the “coon songs” which clearly presaged the “original blues.”
Abundantly illustrated with photographs, newspaper adve
