Ragtime 5
By the 1910s, the term "ragtime" denoted a sub-genre of popular songs available in sheet music, featured in Broadway shows and revues, and recorded by famous performers. Ragtime songs, such as Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911) or " The International Rag" (1913), became bestsellers. These works featured texts that highlighted syncopation, extolled the powers of their musical sources, and celebrated the music's popularity across race, class, and even national lines as an accompaniment for social dancing. Listen to an NPR reporter talk about the connotation associated with the mythic "Alexander" of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and why this work is not a rag.
Unlike the "coon songs" that preceded them, these songs now suggested that ragtime was more inclusively "American" than African American, a position often made clear in the sheet music itself. Whereas earlier sheet music covers, including the original for Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," were illustrated with caricatures of African American couples performing the grand march-derived cakewalk, the covers of these later songs instead depicted the dance practices of youthful, often upper-class, White Americans or White performers, such as celebrity dancers Vernon and Irene Castle. Ragtime, its songs now suggested, was participatory.
| Comparison of the Cover Sheets of the Music of Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin | ||
|---|---|---|
 Cover Sheet of Alexander's Ragtime Band |
 Cover Sheet of The Ragtime Dance |
 Cover Sheet of That International Rag |
However, regardless of the efforts of Joplin and his colleagues, such as Stark, to set ragtime apart from a White/Black or high/low dichotomy, ragtime dance's popularity in the 1910s and its embrace by the mainstream overwhelmingly maintained the inequitable racial masquerade of earlier minstrelsy. Through the complex and pernicious ideologies of racial othering, ragtime, like blackface performance, both fueled the desire and provided the opportunities for White Americans to "act Black," and in doing so, to reaffirm their claims to privileged Whiteness. The terms "dance craze" and "dance mad" circulated widely during the 1910s to describe ragtime dancing's growing popularity while semantically suggesting both the excitement this activity offered and its attendant threat to rationality.