2024 #26 This is Ragtime (Waldo)

This Is Ragtime by Terry Waldo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

CW: Offensive racial language quoted in song titles/genres

This is a fascinating book that is as relevant now as it was in its original release in 1974. Written for a more general audience, rather than an academic one, the book serves as a Who's Who in Ragtime from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through the 1970s (and the 2009 Jazz at Lincoln Center Library Edition adds some additional names and info), as well as an excellent primer on the genre/style. The JALC edition also has some beautifully digitized images of sheet music, that do not come without their share of problems in terms of context, as I will come back to. Also valuable is the discography and bibliography (although in need of an update).

The language reflects norms of the 1970s, so it would be nice to see any further updates consider paying attention to some of that, although I acknowledge it might be that in another twenty years those norms may change again. Waldo doesn't do much to engage with his own positionality as a white man, but he certainly has the professional and experiential credentials to write about Ragtime. The discussion of minstrelsy is fairly objective, and he hints at ideas of internalized racism and respectability politics without naming them. There are some "question mark" moments, particularly in regard to his discussion of the sheet music. For example, p. 22 reproduces sheet music for Ernest Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me" with a strange caption: "This song actually has innocent lyrics and is not a typical "coon" song" with no further explanation until p.100-102 when he modestly clarifies: "...this song, which had very innocent lyrics, for its title alone became a symbol for racism and haunted [Hogan] for the rest of his life." It would have been good to see the actual lyrics, which are only innocent in the context of a Black man in the 1890s writing about being discarded for another man by Lucy Janey Stubbles. While it would have been beyond the scope of the book (and probably the time) to engage in a discussion of ownership of derogatory names (and Waldo does try to explain that "coon songs" became a much more egregious genre), one omission is any discussion of the "art" on the sheet music. The sheet music for this song, in particular, makes use of racial caricature, similar to that used by the Nazis for their publicity surrounding "Entartete Musik" ("degenerate" music), which Waldo does not mention in his otherwise ample discussion of the racial stereotypes and caricatures perpetuated in minstrelsy. Several of the color plates included in the book feature these caricature depictions--notably Harry von Tilzer's "Moving Day" on p. 92. Given the role of sheet music in marketing these songs, it seemed like a missed opportunity to mention the impact of the graphics in perpetuating ideas--even just of plantation nostalgia. In retrospect, it is hard to see any of it as "innocent."

As the book progresses, Waldo relies more upon anecdotal recollections of living performers, which is not a bad thing, but comes with it a responsibility to edit and frame. Six pages are given over to lengthy quotation from conversations with trumpeter Lu Watters (1911 - 1989) which felt better suited to an oral history project, particularly when they veered further afield from actually discussing Ragtime.

The information about Joplin's opera Treemonisha does a good job of mostly objectively explaining the sticky political mess of its copyright and initial productions, and unfortunately the "Introduction to the paperback edition" (1991) was just before University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign mounted a production. There's no update given to what happens with the rights/royalties, which was in litigation as in 1976.

The book does suffer from some copyediting errors, including a rather significant typesetting issue with some musical examples, one that seems to have persisted through the three editions.

Waldo does present ample perspectives about performing Ragtime, although seems not to want to commit too strongly to parsing Ragtime from Jazz (although he does just that in many instances). The recollections from Joshua Rifkin stand in to represent the "academic" perspective (not that it is at all singular), and the subtext here is that "legitimacy" and "authenticity" are moving targets, depending on who is trying to defend what. Waldo notes: "So on a personal level, we all bring the bias of our particular disciplines to the music, we begin to categorize and nail it down in terms of what we already know" (223). This observation at the end of the 1974 edition lends a lot of value to the book as a whole, and helps keep the recollections in check in terms of documentary value. While the book is dated and deserves an update, it is a solid starting point for anyone interested in learning more about Ragtime.

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