The record changer (Jan-Feb 1945)

Afro-American folk idioms, was the fact that no traditional Negro tunes of the spiritual, worksong or blues type were ever used by early ragtime as thematic material. Ragtime, like minstrelsy, was a white man's adaptation of a limited number of Negroid characteristics, and it remained a white man's entertainment despite the fact that Negroes themselves were largely responsible for the propagation of both idioms. Syncopation in early ragtime was still crude, monotonous and repetitive. After a crotchet had begun the bar of common measure, the second beat would frequently be a minim, thus automatically preventing the third beat from being accentuated; or the fourth beat of one bar might be tied to the first beat of the next with the result that no emphasis could fall on the latter. This principle was varied in an infinite number of ways and was, of course, not confined to crotchets and minims; but two results were always present: on the one hand the total time occupied by each bar remained constant as regards mere duration, but, on the other hand, by a continual fluctuation of accent and frequent tied notes, the rhythm, instead of flowing or marching forward in regular measure, constantly jumped, hesitated, or even stood still for a moment while the rest of the music moved on.1 This primitive form of syncopation, crude and mechanical in comparison with the later developments of jazz and blues, remained in fashion from 1895 to the. end of the first world war, even though the development of jazz itself had begun more than a decade before this date. The tradition was still noticeable in 1917 when George Gershwin composed his Rial to Ripples, a rag in the style of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, and in Zez Confrey's Kitten on the Keys, which followed the Ben Harney manner of syncopation. Ragtime insinuated itself into the white man's affection not only from the stage or through piano sheet music, but mainly from the ballroom and through a series of new dances and new dance steps which gradually prepared the American ballroom style for the African complexities of off-beat dancing. It was at this turn of the century that the Negro first became the progenitor of a native American dance tradition as opposed to the British ballroom style, from the slow drag, the ragtime shuffle and the cakewalk to the fox trot, the Charleston,2 the black bottom, the Lindy hop and all the vast complexities of the modern jitterbug variants, American dancing developed further and further away from its European models and came to resemble the African prototype to an ever greater extent. The signal advent of this development was the Chicago World Fair of 1893 which gave the widest possible publicity to the new Negro dances that were to model the ballroom style of the ragtime era — the cakewalk, the pasamala, the hoochie koochie, the bully dance and the bombershay. Most of the tunes of these dances were of European origin, but their rhythmic beat and their off-time steps as performed by Negro dancers were unmistakably of African origin. George W. Lee, in his history of Beale Street, gives this description of the pasamala as performed by Negro entertainers in a fin de siecle Beale Street parlour : "Beneath the bright lights of her crowded dance hall, in the centre of the floor, was a pasaboard where her brown beauties clad in red velvet trunks danced the Pasamala . . . the girls chanted as they danced .... First you do a rag, then you bombershay, Do a sidestep, dip, then you go the other way, Shoot along the line with a Pasamala, Back, back, back, — Don't you go too far!" But where the steps and the timin of these tunes were of African origii the tunes themselves were mostly adapted from European prototypes.1' Ernest Hogan's Pasmala, though composed by a Negro, went back to an Irish strain for its main theme. Irving Jones's pasamala, My Honey, composed by a Negro in 1894, took the theme of its chorus from that old English broadside A Moste Strange Wedding e of the Frogge and the Mouse which survived in Virginia as Frog Went a-Courting and later furnished the basic melody for What You Gonna Do When De Crawfish Gone and What Kind of Pants Does the Gambler Wear.3 Similarly, the cakewalk tunes, like Kerry Mills' Georgia Camp Meeting, were Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic rather than African by inspiration, but when these tunes were danced by Negro entertainers like Johnson and Dora Dean who created the step for the cakewalk, they became pure Africanisms in timing and expression. Thus "the cakewalks furnished the great introduction of ragtime to the Northern Whites. After getting used to a small sample of the substance, the nation was ready to accept the real thing, — genuine Negro ragtime." 4 The invasion of an African idiom not only into the whole popular music of another continent but also into its dance 7