For instance, Lucky Roberts recorded some of his stride pieces for Rudi Blesh’s Circle Records (on 78 rpm shellac records) in 1946. There were some notable exceptions to the albums mentioned above, but these were getting precious little press. In terms of the recording industry, he had even greater visibility than Maddox or Darch, and composed a number of original rags of his own. One other performer to release “commercial” recordings of “ragtime” was Lou Busch (Louis Ferdinand Busch, AKA Joe “Fingers” Carr). I was given a better piano which was perfectly in tune to make the recording, but I strongly suspect the engineer was very disappointed that I didn’t pound out a triple-forte, fast-as-you-can-play rendition of Twelfth Street Rag. When I pointed this out to the recording engineer, he said something like, “Oh, but you’re playing ragtime, right? It’s out-of-tune honky-tonk stuff played in bordellos!” I quickly attempted to dispel this unfortunate notion, saying that the rags of Scott Joplin and others were to be equated with classical music, and that Joplin took his music extremely seriously. Even as late as 1979, when I did my first recording, I sat down to record one of my own rags, and was shocked at how out of tune the piano was. I suspect that the instrumental presentation possibly had more to do with the whims of producers than with the performers themselves. 5 Regardless, these performers were at least putting pre-1960 popular music before the public at large and were getting noticed. Much the same could be said of many of the early recordings of both Bob Darch 4 and Johnny Maddox. I find the endless lack of change in dynamics, fake out-of-tune quality of the pianos, ricky-tick percussion accompaniment, and similar tempi between pieces to be unimaginative. On a personal level, I find many of these recordings to be not terribly interesting. Occasionally, one might find ragtime pieces from the initial era, such as Down Home Rag. There were a series of records released in the mid-1950s and early 1960s by the pseudonymous “Knuckles O’Toole.” 2Rarely on these recordings does one hear anything resembling what one might recognize today as “ragtime.” They are mostly renditions of popular songs from the 1910s and 1920s (not that there’s anything wrong with that) played on a deliberately out-of-tune piano. What was available to the record-buying public in the genre of piano ragtime? Ostensibly, very little. The always-active Blesh has encouraged through recent publication and recording such gifted pianist-composers as William Bolcom, Donald Ashwander, William Albright, and Trebor Tichenor.” 1īut let us now turn our attention to a decade before these words by Max Morath were written. (Astonishing to write that! For so many years, it has been Scott who?)…Both of us feel that the classic ragtime form offers a fresh and challenging direction for composers today. However, as Max Morath stated both succinctly and humorously in his liner notes to his LP and CD versions of his 1973 recording, The World of Scott Joplin, to wit: “…as ragtime continues to establish its place in music there is a tendency to overemphasize him. Recently written ragtime compositions, as a rule, do not attract much attention from the majority of ragtime aficionados nor the general public.
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