The record changer (Mar 1945-Feb 1946)

RAGTIME History and Analysis by DR. BARTLETT D. SIMMS and ERNEST BORNEMAN Ragtime was one of the musical by-products of the American Negro's emancipation from slavery and plantation labor to free employment and labor mobility. In its northward migration and rise to popularity, ragtime thus marks both the urban resettlement of American Negroes and the infiltration of some aspects of the Negro's own pattern of culture into the urban civilization of America. The urban labor market became the social and economic goal of this migration ; small wonder that it also became the focal centre -of the new music. We can easily discern three main trends of this migratory process. The first occurred around the middle of the nineteenth century with the tide of the abolitionist movement; the second, twenty-five years later, with the breakdown of the Southern reconstruction and the Negro's discovery that since the hope of a free life in the South had gone there was nothing left for him except exodus ; the third, another quarter century later, with the opening up of a new labor market for colored entertainers at the various "World Fairs" that offered jobs to musicians, gamblers, restaurateurs, cooks, barmen, liquor dealers and other hangers-on of the entertainment business of both races. This latter movement became first associated with St. Louis and later with Chicago ; whereas New Orleans must therefore be ranked as a place of origin, St. Louis and Chicago, long before the advent of jazz, had reached the status of terminal points in the migratory process of American Negro music. In St. Louis, especially, beautiful women, gaudily dressed gamblers and inordinately talented Negro musicians met and mingled with their white counterparts as well as with the wealthy white men in search of pleasure on a much more casual and relaxed plane than anything the North had to offer by way of real equality and emancipation. As always in the South, the official taboo against mis 4 cegenation was balanced by an unofficial relation of the taboo within the limits of the tenderloin. In this atmosphere ragtime was born. Here Frankie and Johnny met and were commemorated in song. W. C. Handy, who had been out of work for a long time, landed in St. Louis and quickly made enough money to go back to Henderson, Kentucky, his home town, and then on to Memphis where the money came in handily to start a band. With plenty of work for all and plenty of money to throw around after work, the "district" around Chestnut and Market Streets west of Eighteenth became the main breeding place of ragtime even prior to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 when much of the district was cleared to make way for the Union Station that was to cope with the influx of visitors from all over the world. Here, in the saloons, restaurants, cafes, sporting houses, gambling rooms, tent shows and outdoor beer gardens, in the early hours of the morning, the ragtime kings would meet for their informal cutting sessions as modern jazzmen may meet for jam sessions after their nightclub work is over. The first and greatest of these "ragmen" undoubtedly was Thomas Million Turner, or "Tom Turpin" as his friends called him ; his father ran the Silver Dollar, his brother Charlie the Rosebud Hunting and Shooting Club, and Tom himself dabbled in the saloon and sporting house business before he made ragtime a full time occupation ; if anyone around St. Louis had a chance to pick up all there was to be known about piano playing at as early a date in his life as possible, Tom was the boy. By the time he began to play professionally around the district, he had grown into a huge tough-looking character of over 250 pounds who sported a singularly rough vocabulary to hide his natural soft-heartedness. As Mr. Harry Bowman of the Sixth Ward Republican Club recalls, Tom would play intricate fast rags by the hour at his own place, The Booker T. Washington Theatre, at his brother Charlie's tent show, at the Rosebud \ on 2200 Market Street, and lastly, up ! to his death, in 1922, at his new place, the Jazzland, drawing immense crowds wherever he played. He wrote his first rag, the Harlem Rag, in 1896, and' Harry von Tilzer published it the next year. Most of his music submitted to publishers before that date was re5 fused on the grounds that it was too difficult, too barbaric and too intricate, until he found von Tilzer who said in substance: "We will publish it, but' God only knows who can play all those grace notes, bass runs and quixotic ! chords." But he published it, and thus the wisdom of Tom's father paid off who many years ago had hired a German teacher to give Tom a thorough grounding in the classics. When Tom himself grew up to become an employer of musicians, he selected his pianists, singers and bands with a degree of discernment that makes the list of his musicians read like an honors list of American Negro music — W. C. Handy, Will Marion Cook, Bill Robinson, Cramer and Layton, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ethel Waters — all of them worked at j Tom's various places of entertainment. But the most remarkable aspect of his ■ talent as a musical patron was his sponsorship of the new generation of ragtime pianists and composers — especially the remarkable Louis Chauvin, if the greatest natural pianist of them ; all, and the more moderate and disciplined Sam Patterson. Chauvin, nick-named onomatopoeically "Shove-on," was an improvizer and piano virtuoso ranking far above I Tom himself, but since he could not i read or write music, many of his original tunes and syncopations were | transcribed by Tom and later by Scott Joplin without any due credit. In Tom's case, this was less plagiarism than a conviction, apparently shared by Chauvin himself, that ragtime was a pool of so many men's ideas that proprietary rights were a little out of place and that the credit should belong to the man who had enough knowledge to Write down what was i everyone's common musical property. In this sense, the whole copyright situation as indicated on the covers of \ the sheet music is somewhat confused and more than a little misleading if taken literally as an indication of the "composer" in the academic sense of the term. Scott Joplin's case, in this connection, is perhaps the most difficult to analyze. It is almost impossible at this date to decide with any degree of , confidence which of the many pieces that bear Scott's name as arranger or THE RECORD CHANGER L