THEY ALL PLAYED RAGTIME

by RudiBlesh '21 and Harriet Janis. Alfred A. Knopf,x950> 374 PP., $4.00.

Between 1893 and 1904, Chicago, Omaha, Buffalo, and St. Louis put on great expositions. Along their midways drifted ragtime, which Mr. Blesh and Miss Janis call "far and away the gayest, most exciting, most infectiously lilting music ever heard." The sight-seers loved it. Back home, they bought sheet music and pianola rolls of the latest "rags" and listened to cylinder records of Sousa's band struggling solemnly with the Cakewalk. For twenty years ragtime rhythms dominated popular music. Then in 1917 they vanished into the bars in which they originated. But ragtime had prepared the way for jazz and had significantly affected much of the "serious" modern music of Europe and America.

Working with faded scores, rare records and rolls, and interviews with some of the men who made ragtime an international craze, the authors have written the first book on the now nearly forgotten music. With the persistence and enthusiasm of the almost too serious students of jazz and its forerunners, they have followed the growth of ragtime from Negro folk melodies to million-dollar hits and the strange, pathetic ragtime opera, "Treemonisha," written by Scott Joplin, the Negro "king of ragtime," as madness closed in on him. The reader may find their unrelenting superlatives a little hard to accept, but he will be grateful for the wealth of first-hand material, the lists of sheet music, rolls, and records, and the thoughtful inclusion of a piano arrangement of Joplin's greatest hit, MapleLeaf Rag.

A long, uneven, but always interesting study, They All Played Ragtime is a useful contribution to the history of American folk music and culture.