Ragtime and the Blues

St. Louis developed its reputation as one of the capitols of black music long before the music of the blues was invented. Thus it comes as no surprise that it became the center of ragtime, and that ragtime's greatest composer, Scott Joplin, called St. Louis home. Blues and ragtime were the two great outgrowths of nineteenth-century African-American music. From its beginning, ragtime was associated almost exclusively with the piano, an instrument that former slaves often had little access to before the end of the Civil War.

Booker T. Washington related a story that illuminates, however, the role the piano played for many freed slaves in a changing American society. Writing in his autobiography Up From Slavery, he recounted how he was visiting an extremely rural part of plantation Alabama where he was invited to dine with a family of former slaves. He wrote:

"I noticed that, while there were five of us at the table, there was but one fork for the five of us to use. Naturally there was an awkward pause on my part. In the opposite corner of that same cabin was an organ for which people told me they were paying sixty dollars in monthly installments. One fork and a sixty dollar organ!"

Washington failed to understand the importance of music to many former slaves, according to the noted music historian Eileen Southern. She writes: "[Washington] was wrong in assuming that music was not a necessity to the ex-slaves. One of the first ways they showed their independence was to purchase the musical instruments for which they had earlier longed." Foremost among these was the king of instruments, the piano. It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the first forms of musical expression of black Americans was the piano-driven rag music.

previous | next

| Home | History | Culture | Archives | Guides | Search |


National Center for Supercomputing Applications