1 Jan 1893 Jahr - Ragtime introduced to natonal audiences at Chicago World's Columbian Exposition

Beschreibung:

blues: A form of American music that originated in the Deep South, especially from the black workers in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta.
Music also became a booming urban entertainment. By the 1890s, Tin Pan Alley, the nickname for New York City’s song-publishing district, produced such national hit tunes as “A Bicycle Built for Two” and “My Wild Irish Rose.” The most famous sold more than a million copies of sheet music, as well as audio recordings for the newly invented phonograph. To find out what would sell, publishers had musicians play at New York’s working-class beer gardens and dance halls. One publishing agent, who visited “sixty joints a week” to test new songs, declared that “the best songs came from the gutter.”

African American musicians brought a syncopated beat that began, by the 1890s, to work its way into mainstream hits like “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Black performers became stars in their own right with the rise of ragtime. This music, apparently named for its ragged rhythm, combined a steady beat in the bass (played with the left hand on the piano) with syncopated, off-beat rhythms in the treble (played with the right). Ragtime became wildly popular among audiences of all classes and races who heard in its infectious rhythms something exciting — a decisive break with Victorian hymns and parlor songs.

For the master of the genre, composer Scott Joplin, ragtime was serious music. Joplin, the son of formerly enslaved parents, grew up along the Texas-Arkansas border and took piano lessons as a boy from a German teacher. He and other traveling performers introduced ragtime to national audiences at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Seeking to elevate African American music and secure a broad national audience, Joplin warned pianists, “It is never right to play ‘Ragtime’ fast.” But his instructions were widely ignored. Young Americans embraced ragtime.

They also embraced each other, as ragtime ushered in an urban dance craze. By 1910, New York alone had more than five hundred dance halls. In Kansas City, shocked guardians of morality counted 16,500 dancers on the floor on a Saturday night; Chicago had 86,000. Some young Polish and Slovak women chose restaurant jobs rather than domestic service so they would have free time to visit dance halls “several nights a week.” New dances like the Bunny Hug and Grizzly Bear were overtly sexual: they called for close body contact and plenty of hip movement. In fact, many of these dances originated in brothels. Despite widespread denunciation, dance mania quickly spread from the urban working classes to rural and middle-class youth.

San Francisco’s “Barbary Coast” had a wild reputation as a district of brothels, saloons, and other houses of ill repute. As this photo of Spider Kelly’s bar suggests, however, nightclubs could provide a safe place for young couples to meet and dance. Urban singles made such bars wildly popular by the 1910s, prompting reformers and older Americans to express anxiety or condemnation of “dance madness” and its potential moral dangers.


By the 1910s, black music was achieving a central place in American popular culture. African American trumpet player and bandleader W. C. Handy, born in Alabama, electrified national audiences by performing music drawn from black workers in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. Made famous when it reached the big city, this music became known as the blues. Blues music spoke of hard work and heartbreak, as in Handy’s popular hit “St. Louis Blues” (1914):

Got de St. Louis Blues jes blue as I can be,

Dat man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea,

Or else he wouldn’t gone so far from me.

Blues spoke to the emotional lives of young urbanites who were far from home, experiencing dislocation, loneliness, and bitter disappointment along with the thrills of city life. Like Coney Island and other leisure activities, ragtime and blues helped forge new collective experiences in a world of strangers.

Ragtime and blues had a profound influence on twentieth-century American culture. By the time Handy published “St. Louis Blues,” composer Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, was introducing altered ragtime pieces into musical theater — which eventually transferred to radio and film. Lyrics often featured sexual innuendo, as in the title of Berlin’s hit song “If You Don’t Want My Peaches (You’d Better Stop Shaking My Tree).” The popularity of such music marked the arrival of modern youth culture. Its enduring features included “crossover” music that originated in the black working class and a commercial music industry that brazenly appropriated African American musical styles.

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