I’m not a natural ragtime fan, at least not the music most people think of when they hear the word. Solo piano ragtime often feels to me like a mid 20th century invention distinct from the records from 1895-1917 that I grew up on collecting 78s. This is true in both directions, both the hokey piano records of the ’50s and the treatment of a certain selection of rags as masterpieces of high art rather than the masterpieces of popular music they were.
This may be self delusion on my part. As a young man I obsessed over musical origins only to later realize my beloved “country blues” actually postdated and took inspiration from the city blues recorded with jazz bands a decade earlier. True ragtime in my mind was those oldest of my 78s, the more bendy of the music in the pre-jazz era, that rhythm accompanying Collins and Harlan when it gets so inspired you can still feel the abounding joy and freshness of it 120 years later. Even when piano was the only accompaniment, it was accompaniment.
Working for this paper I have learned to appreciate solo piano ragtime for what it is, even to love it. I’ve deliberately acquired and enjoyed the definitive sets our ragtime readers would expect me to know—like Dick Zimmerman’s complete Joplin collection. But my underlying tastes remain for a more filled out ragtime band, even if it is just a piano and bass drum, I like the extra someth
