Introduction to Lesson 10

In the years 1890–1920 in the United States, "ragtimeAn American style of music characterized by "ragged" or syncopated rhythms. It was popular between the 1890's and the 1910's. Scott Joplin was a major exponent of ragtime. By the 1920's ragtime had given way to Jazz" came to be used as a collective term to identify various musical practices and new social dances. Through instrumental works and songs available to the public as mass-marketed media products labeled as ragtime—sheet music and, later, recordings and popular entertainment—ragtime attained a broad audience throughout North America, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe.

A common element in these various manifestations, particularly in the United States, was a strong association of ragtime with African Americans as both creators and practitioners. Ragtime’s racial underpinnings incorporated aspects of two other genres which perpetuated racist stereotypes: First, the earlier but still active phenomenon of blackface minstrelsyDuring the nineteenth Century, minstrelsy was one of the most popular forms of public entertainment in America. It is characterized by the impersonation of Blacks by White actors between acts of plays or during circuses, and the performance of Black musicians who sang, with banjo accompaniment, in city streets. This form of entertainment continued into the early twentieth Century on the vaudeville stage, and second, contemporary "coon songsPopular song style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that presented a stereotyped view of African American, often performed by White singers in Blackface" that contained Negro dialect and were composed and performed first by Whites and later by African Americans. Ragtime’s strong syncopation and musical vitality were heard as spontaneous and exciting by some, and primitive and threatening by others.