Ragtime

Ragtime was the first American popular music form to be widely purchased as sheet music and performed at home pianos — its commercial success in the decade before recorded music defined what “popular music” could mean. At its center was Scott Joplin of Texarkana and Sedalia, Missouri: a classically trained Black pianist and composer whose “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899) became the first piece of sheet music to sell a million copies, and whose “The Entertainer,” “Elite Syncopations” and the Treemonisha opera demonstrated the full range of what he imagined ragtime could become.

The defining feature was syncopation: the melody placed accents on off-beats against a steady bass pattern in the left hand, creating a rhythmic tension that was immediately recognizable and immediately fun. European audiences found it primitive; European composers — Debussy, Stravinsky — were fascinated by it. American popular music found it irresistible.

Ragtime’s decline is usually dated to 1917, when the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first jazz recordings — but the transition was gradual and bidirectional. Jelly Roll Morton carried ragtime’s formal structures into jazz composition; stride piano extended its left-hand patterns into a more physically demanding and harmonically richer form; Broadway absorbed its syncopation into musical theater. Joplin himself died in 1917, before his reputation’s posthumous recovery in the 1970s.