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~~Lord Larehip~~ · 02-25-2014, 08:23 PM

If one wants source material for ragtime, the bible is "They All Played Ragtime" by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. This was the first book to deal with the history of ragtime. A couple of its contributors are friends of mine.

Another is Edward Berlin's "King of Ragtime" which is the definitive Joplin biography.

One nice source is "The Ragtime Ephemeral" by Chris Ware out of Chicago, another friend of mine. I don't think he publishes it anymore. I haven't communicated with him in a long time.

A fantastic source is "Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895" which is full of articles culled mainly from African-American newspaper articles of that period. It's put out by University Press of Mississippi/Jackson. I got it in a cool underground bookstore in the Detroit area but it's probably available online somewhere--Amazon maybe. Very highly recommended.

To study the blackface minstrel era, the definitive work is Professor Dale Cockrell's "Demons of Disorder." This comes very highly recommended. I'll try and touch on some of his themes as I think they are very important.

Another source is "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race" by Scott Malcolmson which gives a nice treatment of the psychology of whites towards minstrelsy.

There are also several books I checked out of libraries that I can't remember the names of now. Also Gunther Schuller's "Early Jazz" is worth a look.

One good audio source is Reginald Robinson's "Euphonic Sounds" which I had to get by writing directly to him--I found him exceedingly polite--which contains not only all three of the Louis Chauvin's surviving songs (the only source to do so to my knowledge and Reginald's version of "Heliotrope" is by far my favorite) but also contains fragment of Joplin music unheard before. Reginald and Chris Ware noticed it in an old photo Joplin's last wife had taken of her deceased husband's piano with manuscripts on it. The top page was a hitherto unknown composition. They used a magnifying glass and studied the original photo housed at Fisk University in Tennessee and were able to transcribe it. It has lyrics but Reginald leaves them out in his 30-second recording of the fragment. Since Joplin didn't generally write lyrics to his pieces, I think it is something he wrote for his opera Treemonisha but then took it out for some reason.

02-25-2014, 08:23 PM	#8 (permalink)
~~Lord Larehip~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Jun 2013 Posts: 899	If one wants source material for ragtime, the bible is "They All Played Ragtime" by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. This was the first book to deal with the history of ragtime. A couple of its contributors are friends of mine. Another is Edward Berlin's "King of Ragtime" which is the definitive Joplin biography. One nice source is "The Ragtime Ephemeral" by Chris Ware out of Chicago, another friend of mine. I don't think he publishes it anymore. I haven't communicated with him in a long time. A fantastic source is "Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895" which is full of articles culled mainly from African-American newspaper articles of that period. It's put out by University Press of Mississippi/Jackson. I got it in a cool underground bookstore in the Detroit area but it's probably available online somewhere--Amazon maybe. Very highly recommended. To study the blackface minstrel era, the definitive work is Professor Dale Cockrell's "Demons of Disorder." This comes very highly recommended. I'll try and touch on some of his themes as I think they are very important. Another source is "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race" by Scott Malcolmson which gives a nice treatment of the psychology of whites towards minstrelsy. There are also several books I checked out of libraries that I can't remember the names of now. Also Gunther Schuller's "Early Jazz" is worth a look. One good audio source is Reginald Robinson's "Euphonic Sounds" which I had to get by writing directly to him--I found him exceedingly polite--which contains not only all three of the Louis Chauvin's surviving songs (the only source to do so to my knowledge and Reginald's version of "Heliotrope" is by far my favorite) but also contains fragment of Joplin music unheard before. Reginald and Chris Ware noticed it in an old photo Joplin's last wife had taken of her deceased husband's piano with manuscripts on it. The top page was a hitherto unknown composition. They used a magnifying glass and studied the original photo housed at Fisk University in Tennessee and were able to transcribe it. It has lyrics but Reginald leaves them out in his 30-second recording of the fragment. Since Joplin didn't generally write lyrics to his pieces, I think it is something he wrote for his opera Treemonisha but then took it out for some reason.