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Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music

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Ragtime is the most underestimated music among those who claim to understand the history of musics in America. It had a dynamic impact that still lasts on popular music, it was a central component in the evolution of the Blues and Jazz was created from Ragtime. It and musics that tried to market themselves as Ragtime were the major musics from the 1890s until the 1920s. Not only did it power the commercial sheet music industry and the nascent recording industry, but it was and is a central component in old time string band music white and black, the blues, and almost every form of traditional folk music as well as folk related musics like Western Swing and Bluegrass.

This book is a good place to start, because it combines a set of chapters that had appeared either as separate articles or as chapters in previously-published books with chapters written for this book to fill in the gap. A broad view of Ragtime with different approaches is presented. So that even the definition of what Ragtime is is presented in several ways.

Even a person who has studied American musics, but not Ragtime, will learn so much here about the shaping of popular music, the spread of the piano, and all sorts of issues.

One thing about this book is that nothing is dumbed down. The articles present musical ideas and questions in standard music notation as well as words.

I want to call particular attention to the article "Ragtime and the Banjo"
by the late Lowell Shreyer. This article speaks not only to how the banjo helped give birth to Ragtime, but how Ragtime's disappearance tended to lead to the decline of the five string banjo and the rise of the tenor. There are other facts and ideas there that are rich and need to be understood by anyone concerned with the history of the banjo.

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