Ragtime probably takes its name from dances held by enslaved people
Ragtime, named for its syncopated or ragged rhythm, grew out of African American communities in the late nineteenth century and boomed from the 1890s to the 1910s. Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime, made it famous with the Maple Leaf Rag and The Entertainer, and it went on to shape early jazz.
The word first appears in print in 1896, when the vaudeville pianist Ben Harney used it for music he had published the year before, but it likely comes from rags, dance events held by enslaved Black people on plantations. The historian Terry Waldo traces the style to the music played at those gatherings, usually by just a banjo and a fiddle running through jigs, reels and schottisches, with the banjo's picking supplying the characteristic syncopation. European classical music, Irish jigs and Scottish cakewalks are thought to have fed in too.
Nothing written down or recorded survives from before the 1890s, so oral memory fills the gap. Jessie Pickett's The Dream Rag, with a habanera bass rather than the march bass of later rags, was played at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where Joplin, Harney and Shep Edmonds were also present. Eubie Blake, who learned it from Pickett around 1900, called it the oldest rag he knew. Louis Moreau Gottschalk's earlier pieces such as Bamboula used Caribbean syncopations drawn from his family's Saint-Domingue repertoire, though musicologist Frederick Starr found no evidence at all for claims that Congo Square was the source.
Composed ragtime took shape in the Mississippi Valley, above all St. Louis, among musicians who mostly played by ear on banjo or piano in bars, brothels, saloons, house parties and juke joints. The first published rag was Harney's song about a broken-down old wagon, registered in January 1895 in Louisville, and it became a significant hit. Ernest Hogan's La Pas Ma La, from later that year, is often wrongly called the first by a Black composer; scholar Edward Berlin notes its bass and melody lack true ragtime rhythm. Berlin dates the full arrival of instrumental ragtime to 1897, when about a dozen syncopated pieces appeared.
Rags resemble marches, stringing several themes together with repeats and returns, and were spread through sheet music and piano rolls. James Scott and Joseph Lamb joined Joplin among the leading composers. Ragtime influenced stride piano, Piedmont blues, and composers Satie, Debussy and Stravinsky. Jazz eclipsed it in the 1920s, but revivals followed, notably in the 1970s when Joplin's music was adapted for the film The Sting.
Source: Ragtime
