Naked
Ladies and Electric Ragtime (Michael
Chapman)
The
music
Ragtime is probably best known to most people from
the soundtrack to the film "The Sting" and most of the music in the
film, including the theme tune "The Entertainer," is by the greatest of
the ragtime composers, Scott Joplin.
Like the blues, ragtime can be partly traced back
to the folk songs and dance music of the plantation slaves in the
American deep south, but "classic" ragtime was written piano music from
the years between about 1895 and 1915, Joplin's own heyday. It was
"parlour music" played as much by white as by black people. In this
period, other crazes such as the "minstrel song" and the cakewalk dance
spread rapidly.
A syncopated ragtime "feel" can be found in a lot
of jazz and other music of the 1920s onwards, and the word "rag" keeps
popping up in song titles throughout the great period of "Tin Pan
Alley" songwriting. There is a strong ragtime element in the guitar
playing of some of the early bluesmen, especially Blind Blake and
Mississippi John Hurt. .
