On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  After the singer had responded to a rousing encore, the stout man at the piano began to run his fingers up and down the keyboard…. Then he began to play;and such playing!…It was music of a kind I had never heard before. It was music that demanded physical response, patting of the feet, drumming of the fingers, or nodding of the head in time with the beat. The barbaric harmonies, the audacious resolutions, often consisting of an abrupt jump from one key to another, the intricate rhythms in which the accents fell in the most unexpected places, but in which the beat was never lost, produced a most curious effect.

  However they did it, they did it right, and ragtime became a national rage.

  There is some disagreement about what constitutes the “official” beginning of ragtime. The first published song to include the word rag is thought to be white bandleader William Krell’s “Mississippi Rag,” which appeared in 1897. Several months later, Tom Turpin’s “Harlem Rag” was published, the first ragtime work published by a black composer. While these two works are acknowledged as the “official” beginning of ragtime, the genre actually got its start through another musical genre called coon songs, the word coon being a racial slur toward blacks because whites thought that raccoons were a preferred source of meat for plantation slaves. However, the coon song bridged minstrelsy and ragtime because it employed syncopation. In fact, in 1896, a year before the two aforementioned works were published, black composer Ernest Hogan’s “All Coons Look Alike to Me” featured the caption “Choice Chorus, with Negro ‘Rag’ Accompaniment.” This song became so popular that during the Ragtime Championship of the World Competition in New York in 1900, each of the three semifinalists were required to play it for two minutes. Despite the song’s success, Hogan was hurt by the many musicians who refused to play his work because the title was offensive, even though the lyrics portray a black woman who rejects her boyfriend in favor of another man by declaring that “All coons look alike to me.” Certainly by those same standards, many current hit rap and hip-hop songs would never be played by black performers. Still, the coon songs’ popularity made it easier for ragtime to take hold.

  With popularity there is always the backlash. Some music critics dismissed ragtime as a mere fad, the way rock ’n’ roll was similarly dismissed in the 1950s. Metronome magazine described it as “a popular wave in the wrong direction.” The American Federation of Musicians told its members to refuse to play ragtime, explaining that “the musicians know what is good, and if the people don’t, we shall have to teach them.” Ragtime would go on to introduce white America to something it wasn’t used to: a large group of piano-playing, music-composing African-Americans. One of the most prominent among them was Scott Joplin.

  Scott Joplin: More than the Entertainer

  Scott Joplin (1868–1917), sometimes known as the King of Ragtime, provided some broad shoulders for future generations to climb aboard. Although other composers may have produced more complex works, Joplin’s ambitions for ragtime were far beyond anyone else’s. In his efforts to raise ragtime above its perceived pop music status, he composed not only some of the most famous ragtime songs, but also two ragtime operas and a ragtime ballet. Just as the Who, with their rock opera Tommy, attempted to expand the limited boundaries of how the world viewed rock ’n’ roll, so did Joplin want the world to see that ragtime could be more than just peppy saloon music. In direct opposition to the perception of ragtime music as fingers blazing across piano keys, he added this notation to his published compositions: “NOTE: Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast.”

  Born in Texas in 1868, Joplin received much of his musical background from his parents. Scott’s father, Jiles Joplin, before the Emancipation Proclamation freed him, played the violin at slave owners’ parties. Scott’s mother, Florence Givens Joplin, sang and played the banjo. When Jiles Joplin left his family, Florence relied on domestic work to support her six children. Sometimes Scott would go with his mother to the homes where she worked, playing on the homeowners’ pianos while his mother cleaned. By the time he was a teenager, he was performing as a professional pianist as well as teaching music.

  In the mid-1880s he moved to St. Louis, making a living as a pianist in nightclubs. In the mid-1890s he moved to Sedalia, Missouri, and began attending the George R. Smith College for Negroes to study harmony and composition. Then in 1897, with the publication of “Maple Leaf Rag,” his career took off. But rather than exploiting his success by writing the same song over and over, he began pushing the limits of the form. Each new song took ragtime in a new direction, cross-pollinating with other musical genres. His canon of work reveals a man driven to ride ragtime not just through the foot-stomping party of the average music lover, but also into the thin atmosphere of critical appreciation. One particular area he pioneered was the use of more sophisticated lyrics to go with the ragtime music. Commenting on the typical ragtime lyrics, Joplin said, “I have often sat in theaters and listened to beautiful ragtime melodies set to almost vulgar words…and have wondered why some composers will continue to make people hate ragtime because the melodies are set to such bad words.” If the lyrics improved, Joplin reasoned, not only would ragtime be more appreciated, but so would African-Americans, who originated it. Why wouldn’t whites see blacks as degenerate, he argued, if this was the kind of message we promoted through our songs (an accusation also made more recently against the lyrics in rap and hip-hop songs)?

  These new directions were often grandly visionary, but financially unsuccessful. Joplin’s folk ballet, The Ragtime Dance (1899), received one performance. He staged one performance of his rag opera, A Guest of Honor (1903), with his own Scott Joplin Drama Company. Although he never found a publisher for the score of that opera, he immediately began work on his second opera, Treemonisha, which he finished in 1905. Despite his mounting success, no one was interested in publishing his new opera, so he published the 230-page work himself in 1911. Two years later he was able to stage a bare-cupboard production himself in Harlem. But the lack of costumes, scenery, lighting, or orchestra (only Joplin playing the score on the piano) left the audience underwhelmed and the show closed immediately. Joplin’s opera, which explored the folk roots of black American music, didn’t inspire a black audience that was trying to create a new image of the African-American, not celebrate ties to the old image that white America held on to with both fists.

  A year after the failure of Treemonisha, Joplin was committed to the Manhattan State Hospital, where he died several months later from complications brought on by syphilis. By now the ragtime craze had already passed, and many of Joplin’s unpublished compositions were destroyed when his publisher moved in 1935. Joplin, once the foremost ragtime celebrity, died in near obscurity. Then came The Sting, and Joplin, as well as ragtime, was hot again. Even his most prized and nurtured work, Treemonisha, was revived. When the Houston Grand Opera performed it in 1976, Joplin, though dead nearly sixty years, was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

  Though Harlem rejected Joplin’s more groundbreaking efforts, ironically he embodied many of the qualities that the Harlem Renaissance promoted. He celebrated the past accomplishments of African-Americans, yet he pushed the boundaries of traditional music composition to create new forms. In doing so, he became one more shining black face that white Americans had to acknowledge did not fit their stereotypical image. And, he charged through the musical landscape to create a clear path for jazz. “Joplin’s single-minded determination to merge vernacular African-American music with the mainstream traditions of Western composition prefigured, in many regards, the later development of jazz,” wrote music historian Ted Gioia (The History of Jazz). “By straddling the borders of highbrow and lowbrow culture, art music and popular music, African polyrhythm and European formalism, Joplin anticipated the fecund efforts of later artists such as Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, and Art Tatum, among others.”

  Ragtime had proven to be such a commercial
success that American sheet music publishers were hungry for the next “new thing” that would catch America’s fancy. And their eyes were watching the blues.

  Birth of the Blues: A Disturbance in the Soul

  Blues and jazz seemed to come of age at the same time, like fraternal twins who share the same parents and bone structure but don’t look alike. Yet, most people use the words jazz and blues interchangeably. That’s an easy mistake to make since some of the most famous musicians from the Harlem Renaissance played both. But, while the two styles are inexorably intertwined, they are in no way interchangeable. Novelist and music critic Albert Murray offers a succinct description of their difference in attitude: “The blues is a device for transcending, or at least coping with, adversity,” while jazz is a device for “stomping away the blues.” Comedienne Carol Burnett’s famous definition of comedy as being “tragedy—plus time” can be adapted here as “Jazz is the blues—plus time.” In other words, blues is the ailment; jazz is the treatment. Blues mourns the hardships of daily life and love—hardships made worse by the restrictions of a harshly racist society—while jazz embodies the Harlem Renaissance’s optimistic vision of the future.

  The term blues seems to have come from the phrase the blue devils, which dates back to at least the eighteenth century. One theory of its origin is that indigo dyers who worked in textile mills dying cloth were physically affected by the blue dye seeping into their skin, causing symptoms of depression. But the blues as we’ve come to know it in music had much more emotional origins, evolving from the slave songs, spirituals, field hollers, and other forms of music that slaves and dirt-poor laborers sang to express the hopelessness and darkness of spirit they sometimes felt. Blues and jazz singer Alberta Hunter (1895–1984) captured the essence of those emotional origins with her own description of the blues: “Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed.”

  The hurt heart and disturbed soul can express themselves in various ways, and the blues attempted to embrace that entire emotional spectrum. While the musical structure of the song was fairly standard—twelve bars in 4/4 or 2/4 time—the lyrics ran the gamut of emotions. Blues lyrics often were a personal narrative expressing the hardships of love and life. And while those lyrics certainly evoked the mournful blues we’re all so familiar with, the blues could also be humorous, playfully bawdy, or even downright graphic. “Down in the Alley” by Memphis Millie, for example, describes a prostitute having sex with johns in an alley. This kind of explicit blues song was known as gut-bucket blues because the bucket used to fashion a makeshift bass to accompany the blues was also used to clean pig intestines for chitterlings, a familiar African-American dish. The gut-bucket blues helped make the blues popular among some, but also caused a backlash among the more “upstanding,” churchgoing members of the black communities. But, as we’ve seen so far in the history of jazz, every musical innovation—whether ragtime, blues, or jazz itself—provoked a moral backlash. In some cases, the indignation was based on an affront to prevailing morality; but some of the rejection of the music was based on blacks not wanting to be associated with the sensuality and earthiness that they felt played into the negative stereotypes whites already had of them. How, they wondered, would African-Americans be taken seriously as artists, thinkers, and businesspeople if the image white America constantly saw was a black face singing about sex, cheating, and runaway fathers? However, the blues was so much more than gut-bucket songs, much more than revealing the emotional dirty laundry of blacks; it was also a cry of outrage that exposed the dirty laundry of American history.

  The soul of the blues comes from somewhere deep inside the murky heart, but the technique of the blues has a clear musical lineage. Some historians have traced it back to the Islamic music of West and Central Africa, where slaves played stringed instruments, sometimes pressing a knife against the strings similar to the slide-guitar technique later used by blues guitarists. In the United States, the blues evolved out of the same repressed environment. Conventional wisdom dates the beginning of the blues as a musical form between 1870 and 1900, the period following emancipation during which former slaves had to adjust to the economic pressures and personal expectations—and bitter disappointments—of freedom. Especially when that “freedom” was under constant attack by Jim Crow laws and brutal lynch mobs. Fighting to survive in the face of all these onslaughts took a heavy emotional toll on blacks, and the blues helped express their mounting frustration. Harlem Renaissance writer W. E. B. Du Bois described this frustration when he noted that “sorrow songs,” the slave spirituals that were the forerunners of the blues, were “the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”

  In part, the blues was about economics. Being poor is an enormous rock to try to shoulder up a steep hill, day after day, especially when so many are trying to kick your feet out from under you. Being poor was something many Southern whites had in common with blacks during the post–Civil War years. As a result, they developed their own form of the blues: country music. Today when we talk about the blues and country music, it’s as if we’re discussing two different planets. But both kinds of music developed at the same time in the same place, both expressing some of the same emotional content. In the 1920s, record companies made the distinction between the two kinds of music based solely on the color of the performer. If the performer was white, it was marketed as “hillbilly music”; if the performer was black, it was sold as “race music.” Sometimes the music was so similar that record companies miscategorized the records. Certainly, when it comes to human beings reflecting on the passions of love, loss, and disappointment, there is an overlapping that is indistinguishable. Yet, as both evolved, the blues articulated the nuances of the black experience more precisely, while country music revealed that of the white experience. True, emotional urges may be universal, but how we express them, how we react to them, what options we have to do something about them—they are the result of our cultural surroundings.

  African-American writer Richard Wright, author of the seminal novel Native Son, thought that the sadness in blues songs had a deeper, more sinister origin: “The most striking feature of these songs is that a submerged theme of guilt, psychological in nature, seems to run through them. Could this guilt have stemmed from the burden of renounced rebellious impulses?” He goes on to wonder if the sexual nature of many of the songs isn’t in fact more about the impotence of black people in failing to act on their own behalf in the face of the racism that was at the root of much of their “blues.” Weren’t the blues just redirected self-loathing, the result of an oppressed people believing the oppressor’s propaganda that they are not worthy? Still, Wright admired the blues for nurturing an indomitable spirit that still lurked within: “Yet the most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, though replete with a sense of defeat and down-heartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic; their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through sheer force of sensuality, into an almost exultant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement.”

  W. C. Handy: Father of the Blues

  The blues as a separate musical form received its “official” launch in 1912 with the publication of W. C. Handy’s (1873–1958) “Memphis Blues.” Though Arthur Seals’s “Baby Seals’ Blues” and Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” were published that same year, W. C. Handy became the most famous—and took the most credit—mostly because his skill as a musician was matched by his ability as a businessman. He promoted himself as the Father of the Blues and eventually the tag stuck. Handy’s legendary story of how he discovered the blues, recounted in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, only adds to the music’s giddy mythology. In 1903, thirty-year-old Handy, the son of an ex-slave turned minister, was waiting at a train stop in Tutwiler, Mississi
ppi. Handy was already an accomplished musician, the leader of the Mahara Minstrels, a small orchestra that played operatic overtures and popular songs. As he waited for the late train, trying to sleep, a raggedly dressed black man sat beside him and began playing the guitar, sometimes pressing a knife blade against the strings for a more mournful sound meant to imitate the voice of the singer (a signature technique in the blues). He began singing, “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.” Confused by the words, Handy asked him what they meant. The man explained that he was going to where the Southern railroad crossed the Yazoo Delta railroad, which black sharecroppers had nicknamed Yellow Dog. Said Handy, “This was not unusual. Southern Negroes sang about everything. Trains, steamboats, steam whistles, sledge hammers, fast women, mean bosses, stubborn mules…. They accompany themselves on anything from which they can extract a musical sound or rhythmical effect, anything from a harmonica to a washboard.” From this, Handy realized that the power in a song could be generated by the most mundane experiences.

  That encounter awakened Handy’s musical curiosity, but another event awakened his business acumen. While he was leading his orchestra at a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, he received a note from a spectator requesting that he play some “native” music. Admittedly, he was baffled, but led his orchestra in an old-time Southern medley. Immediately afterward, he received a second note, this one asking if it would be okay if a few local musicians played for a while. Happy to take what amounted to a paid break, Handy agreed. Three scraggly black musicians took the stage; their only instruments were a battered guitar, a mandolin, and a shabby bass. Handy described their music “as pretty well in keeping with their looks. They struck up one of those over-and-over strains that seem to have no clear beginning and certainly no ending at all. The strumming attained a disturbing monotony, but on and on it went, a kind of stuff that has long been associated with cane rows and levee camps.”