Contribution and Significance
Ragtime has continued to inspire performers, listeners, dancers, and composers. The interest revival first sparked by Blesh and Janis in the 1950s and rekindled in the 1970s spread beyond the piano repertory. Alongside solo pianists, ragtime repertory and arrangements of piano rags were increasingly being offered in the tenty-first century by instrumentalists and ensembles such as the New England Ragtime Ensemble.
Meanwhile, vintage dance enthusiasts were likewise embracing ragtime's one-step and fox-trot. E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime (1975) and the subsequent musical drawn from it by Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Terrance McNally in 1998 used the captivating music and its mixed racial heritage to represent a critical time in United States history. As a precursor to the better-known Jazz Age, ragtime has continued to draw attention to the longstanding power of American popular culture. Its socio-musical culture has attracted worldwide attention, even as the legacy of slavery, which helped to shape it, has continued to demand internal remediation.
