Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  In Germany, the Kaiser warned his military to shun families who indulged in the dance. The British royal family let it be known that Queen Mary did not approve, and a magazine with the comforting title of The Gentlewoman described it as ‘The Dance of Moral Death21’. The Archbishop of Paris wrote a newspaper column denouncing the tango’s moral failings. A middle-aged man in Philadelphia was arrested after severely beating his 35-year-old son. ‘If I catch him cutting22 up any more with the tango,’ he said defiantly, ‘I’ll repeat the dose.’ There was no awareness of the dance’s origins in the brothels and cafes of Argentina and Uruguay, or its status there as a dramatic exploration of male sensuality and female subversion. By the time it reached Britain, it was merely another demonstration of what Lady Helmsley called ‘nigger-dance characteristics23’.

  Fortunately, British society found a way to accommodate and smooth out the lascivious traits of the tango. A woman named Gladys Beattie Crozier wrote a book of etiquette entitled The Tango, and How to Do It. The Queen’s Theatre in London launched ‘tango teas’, at which patrons watched calmly from their tables as an exhibition of dancing was followed by a fashion parade. Other prestigious restaurants highlighted an equally enticing Brazilian dance, the maxixe, performed to music that shared the four-part structure of ragtime.

  Married couple Vernon and Irene Castle had been hired to demonstrate the latest dances at the Café de Paris in the French capital. After moving to the sister restaurant in New York, they opened a dancing school, and then a chain of salons across America. The Victor label inaugurated a series of dance records under the Castles’ name, with black bandleader James Reese Europe providing suitable music for the turkey trot and the rest.

  Western civilisation, it seemed, had gone ‘dance crazy’. The hottest theatre ticket in London – where it was possible at Christmas 1912 to buy a wind-up ‘nigger ragtime doll’ – was for a revue entitled Hullo Ragtime, originally intended for the pantomime season, but so popular that its run was extended for two years. (One of the stars of its all-white cast was named Bob Dillon.) Every few months a ‘new edition’ of the show would be announced, replacing the songs that had become stale. Eventually the revue closed, but only to be replaced by the remarkably similar Hullo Tango. There were now syncopated songs on every imaginable subject, including ‘Ragtime Suffragette’ and ‘Let’s Have Free Trade Amongst the Girls’ to mirror pressing political controversies. The playwright George Bernard Shaw, always eager to reflect society’s whims, had his two leading characters in the 1913 play Androcles and the Lion dancing to ragtime. The following year, he staged The Music-Cure, a satire on the country’s preoccupation with this American import.

  The likely consequences of this ceaseless ‘ragging’ were hotly debated. Ragtime was blamed for the arrest of a young man who was found drunk and disorderly in North London, clinging to a lamp post while he bellowed a current hit. It was reported that bands in top restaurants would break into ragtime when the establishments were preparing to close, to encourage the diners to eat more quickly. That the hypnotic, unsettlingly irregular rhythms of ragtime would affect the psyche, there seemed no doubt. The actor Gerald du Maurier declared that all the ragtime movements were ‘only forms of the oldest dance24 in the world, St Vitus’ Dance’. There was talk of dancers being ‘inoculated with the ragtime-fever25’; of a ‘virulent poison26’, a ‘malarious epidemic27’; of ragtime being ‘syncopation gone mad28’, which ‘can only be treated29 successfully like the dog with rabies, namely, with a dose of lead’. These various accusations were neatly summed up by one critic: ‘when taken to excess30, it overstimulates; it irritates’. Thinly veiled beneath these dismissive verdicts was a fear that the impulse most vulnerable to this overstimulation would be immorality. The twitching rhythms, convulsive dance steps and physical contact occasioned by dancing to ragtime would be sure to lead to licentiousness; to freedom; to, as one American commentator thundered, ‘falling prey to the collective soul31 of the negro’.

  There were those, however, who welcomed the jolt of ragtime as a long-overdue awakening from cultural stasis, an adrenaline surge that could be guaranteed to set ‘the nerves and muscles tingling with excitement’. Ragtime historian Edward Berlin uncovered one account of exposure to the music, which shares the evangelical fervour of those who first experimented with psychedelic chemicals: ‘Suddenly I discovered that my legs33 were in a condition of great excitement. They twitched as though charged with electricity and betrayed a considerable and rather dangerous desire to jerk me from my seat. The rhythm of the music, which had seemed so unnatural at first, was beginning to exert its influence over me. It wasn’t that feeling of ease in the joints of the feet and toes which might be caused by a Strauss waltz, no, much more energetic, material, independent, as though one encountered a balking horse, which it is absolutely impossible to master.’ Independence that was impossible to master: it was exactly this quality of syncopated youthful rebellion that struck fear into adult hearts.

  Along Atlantic Coast resorts34 and in summer parts, etc., it is the song everybody is singing and whistling.

  Edison Phonograph Monthly, 1911

  As they would say in the States35, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ is it. We have ragtime hits every season now, but this catchy number would seem to be by far the biggest thing of its kind ever introduced over here.

  Phono Trader & Recorder, 1912

  Catchier even than ‘All Alone’ (‘the great telephone song’); or that ‘Hebrew’ ragtime novelty, ‘Yiddle on Your Fiddle’, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ swept rapidly across the English-speaking world in 1911–12. It was introduced in vaudeville by Emma Carus, then taken up by the leading recording artists of the day – Billy Murray, sounding decidedly aged at 34; Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan, affecting to be a male and female duet team; and Billy Fay, who attracted a review so laden with racial stereotyping that it bears repeating in full: ‘One of the Children of Ham36, as light-hearted as he is dark-visaged, endearingly apostrophises his ebony inamorata as “Ma Honey” many times repeated, from which one may gather that our “cullud brudder” must be very much in love with his sooty Dinah or Chloe, as the case may be. Very cleverly sung by Mr Fay, who hits off the negro idiom of vernacular as if to the manner born.’

  The song originated not from a ‘cullud brudder’ but from a young man of Jewish descent who was named Israel Baline by his parents in Russia, though his identity was anglicised as Irving Berlin. We met him earlier as a singing waiter working for ‘Nigger Mike’ Saulter (another Russian Jew, awarded his affectionate nickname because of his dark complexion). Berlin oozed melody and invention, though he wrote his songs solely on what he called the ‘nigger keys’ of the keyboard. When he became successful, he purchased a transposing piano, which allowed him to change key with a flick of a switch, rather than learn to utilise the ‘white’ notes as well. For more than four decades, he consistently turned out hit songs. Many of them are still instantly recognisable today, 130 years after his birth: ‘White Christmas’, ‘God Bless America’, ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’, ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ and ‘Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better’. Born before the launch of the gramophone as a commercial enterprise, he lived long enough to hear Madonna and hip hop, although as early as 1962, when he was a mere 74 years old, he already knew that his time as a commercially viable songwriter had passed: ‘You don’t have to stop yourself37. The people who have to listen to your songs tell you to stop.’

  More than half a century earlier, his irrepressibly bubbly, almost unfailingly optimistic songs extolled the joy of music-making. He first caught the public’s imagination with ‘My Wife’s Gone to the Country’ – ‘Hooray! Hooray!’, ran the chorus – before revising a familiar strain from the classical repertory as ‘That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune’. But it was ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ that reached even the people who had managed, in those days before mass communications, to ignore the previous fifteen years of the ragtime craze. Berlin w
as an astute critic of his own work: ‘The lyric, silly though it was38, was fundamentally right. Its opening words, emphasised by immediate repetition – “Come on and hear! Come on and hear!” – were an invitation to “come”, to join in and “hear” the singer and his song. And that idea of inviting every receptive auditor within shouting distance became a part of the happy ruction – an idea pounded in again and again throughout the song in various ways – [and] was the secret of the song’s tremendous success.’

  Within a few months, he had fashioned an equally exhilarating sequel, ‘Everybody’s Doin’ It Now’, the precise nature of ‘it’ left to the listener’s imagination. Besides all else, ‘it’ definitely involved dancing, which is how Berlin became associated with the Castles, cementing his reputation as the king of the dance tune. Like Scott Joplin before him, he lost his first wife within a few months of their marriage in 1912. From his grief came a ballad devoid of syncopation, ‘When I Lost You’, which sold more than a million copies as a music sheet. A decade later, Berlin penned two songs that drew on his grief, ‘What’ll I Do?’ and (another) ‘All Alone’ – thereby inaugurating a strand of lonely-in-my-room songs which would spark the 1960s and 70s cliché of the ‘bedsitter balladeer’. The only ambition that defeated him was one he shared with Joplin: his determination, expressed in a 1913 interview which credited him with writing ‘Five Tunes a Day39’, to create ‘a grand opera in ragtime … a real opera on a tragic theme’.

  The performer who best expressed the joy of Berlin’s songs was slightly older than him; Jewish, though Lithuanian rather than Russian; anglicised for public consumption, too, from Asa Yoelsen to Al Jolson. His reputation has been scarred by the blackface make-up he first adopted in his late teens, although he always claimed – stretching the truth a little – that ‘a Negro dresser40’ had told him he’d get more laughs that way. Spike Lee’s barbed show-business movie satire Bamboozled (2000) drove the final stake through the heart of this dubious ritual, but to dismiss Jolson, a genius of entertainment, because he followed a thoroughly orthodox tradition is imposing modern values on a century-old milieu.

  Jolson’s innovations were lasting. He was the first popular singer to realise that his audience demanded a show, which shone from start to finish. He was the first to build a company, and carry it from town to town, showgirls, lighting, orchestra and all. He sang around the beat, carrying it forward, holding it back, acting out every song as if it was gushing from his heart. As with the compulsive improvisers of the rock era, such as Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, ‘there was the anticipation41 of discovering how he was going to sing his songs’, his biographer Michael Freedland recounted. ‘Even when he repeated songs in subsequent performances, he changed the way he delivered them. The Winter Garden regulars played games with each other – spotting the changed lyric, the different treatment of a chorus, the substituted phrase.’fn1

  So ebullient was Jolson, so charged with energy, that when he was first asked to record, in 1912, he skipped around in front of the Victor recording horn as if he were still under Broadway lights. ‘In the end,42’ Freedland wrote, ‘they placed a coat around him, buttoning it at the back like a straitjacket, sat him on the chair and told him to sing without moving.’ The result was ‘That Haunting Melody’, delivered with a pizzazz and satirical edge that must have been startling to his peers – and which anticipated the barnstorming performances to come.

  The joint efforts of Jolson and Berlin seem to have loosened the spine of the American recording industry (then, as now, dominating the release schedules in Britain as well). Exuberance was the spirit of 1912–13: ‘Everybody Two-Step’, ‘Ring-Ting-a-Ling’, ‘The Gaby Glide’ (yet another dance), ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’, ‘Ragtime Jocky Man’, ‘In Ragtime Land’ – the permutations were endless. Collins and Harlan teased out the potential for sexual innuendo in ‘Row! Row! Row!’, a comic tale on the theme of infidelity; Jolson decried ‘The Spaniard That Blighted My Life’; Elsie Janis, a 22-year-old vaudeville star, pleaded ‘Fo’ De Lawd’s Sake, Play a Waltz’, because hearing another rag would send her doolally.

  So vibrant was the industry of ragtime, so enlivened the nerves of its aficionados, that a copywriter for His Master’s Voice advertised the company’s latest wares with what sounded like a plea for the madness to end: ‘So nothing is to be sacred43 to Ragtime’s composers, and one awaits only the transformation of an entire Handel oratorio into Ragtime to provide the limit of its shamelessness. Yet it has a great fascination, this syncopated music – its restlessness and lilt have a charm all their own, and there is little doubt that the vogue will be lasting – but one can’t help wondering, where will it stop?’

  In Europe, it stopped with war. Not that the rag culture could be dulled entirely. It took only a month for a British sailor to boast that ‘We had our first battle yesterday44 … we saw them off in ragtime.’ But ten weeks into a global conflict which was destined to stretch for four apocalyptic years, a Daily Mirror headline stated: ‘Homely Songs Stir Nation’s Heart45. Old-Time Ballads Replace Ragtime and Jingo Songs’. There was little appetite, it seemed, for compositions that ridiculed the Germans or trumpeted British supremacy, such as ‘We’re Going to Hang the Kaiser under the Linden Tree’. It was nostalgia, family and the comforting memory of hearth and garden and rolling hills that won the hearts of those on the way to the slaughter fields of France, and those left behind: ‘Home Sweet Home’, rather than the latest sensations from America, such as ‘Ballin’ the Jack’ and ‘The Memphis Blues’.

  A reporter for the Daily Mail described hearing troops in France singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, a pre-war music-hall song, and his account ensured that others followed suit, to the delight of the song’s publisher. Other songs won their familiarity more organically, through their ability to tap into the collective mood. ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, written for a London revue, failed to spark but then won an American competition to find a wartime marching song. (Its co-creator, Felix Powell, committed suicide whilst wearing his Home Guard uniform in the Second World War.) ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ was rewritten by soldiers as ‘Lord Kitchener’s Army’, one of dozens of familiar music-hall and even hymn tunes that were adapted to serve the sometimes profane needs of the fighting men. As the horror of trench warfare intensified, those in the front line took comfort from the dark humour of ‘Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire’, or from revising a familiar song: ‘If you were the only Boche in the trench, and I had the only bomb’.

  Ivor Novello and Lena Guilbert Ford’s ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ was a favourite on the home front. It was carried to the troops by concert parties dispatched to heighten morale. Also sent to France, often by the Red Cross, were hundreds of portable gramophones, so that the soldiers – when they weren’t enduring savage bombardment or burying the mutilated remains of their comrades – could delude themselves that they were sharing the same culture as their loved ones across the Channel. ‘Every YMCA hut46, every canteen and every hospital at the front has its gramophone’, a major manufacturer boasted in 1917. ‘Any padre will tell you that it is one of the greatest influences for good that can be found. In the officers’ mess of a regiment that has won many laurels, there is a standing rule that any officer going on leave must bring back with him at least a dozen records of the songs from the current hit “shows”.’

  There were sufficient Americans of European descent to ensure that the United States took a close interest in the Great War, even before it became enmeshed in the carnage. The American Quartet offered the most popular version of ‘Tipperary’, which its US publisher promoted as ‘The song They sing as They march along’ even before that was true. Billy Murray’s tongue-twister ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’ was presumably intended to be sympathetic. But the internal political battle over whether America should be pulled into the war was also reflected in its songs. The Peerless Quartet’s ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’ aimed for the heart, with its tale
of a mother crying for mediation rather than military action. ‘Don’t Take My Darling Boy Away’ tugged at the same delicate strings. The Peerless Quartet switched perspectives by hymning the peace-mongering qualities of their president with ‘I Think We’ve Got Another Washington (Wilson is His Name)’. It was left to Frederick J. Wheeler in 1916 to sound the battle cry with ‘Wake Up America!’: ‘Let’s get ready to answer duty’s call … America is ready!’

  Eventually, on 6 April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany; and Tin Pan Alley was ready. ‘Let’s All Be Americans Now’, declared the American Quartet, throwing in a chorus of the Southern anthem ‘Dixie’ to reinforce the point. Their Peerless colleagues forgot their earlier misgivings by recording what the publisher called ‘The Sentiment of Every American Mother’: ‘America, Here’s My Boy’. Suddenly, the recording industry could offer nothing but war songs, from the hopeful (‘Say a Prayer for the Boys Over There’) to the sentimental (‘Somewhere in France is Daddy’) and the gloriously confused (‘I Don’t Know Where I’m Going, But I’m on My Way’). The unchallenged champion of America’s war anthems, however, was ‘Over There’, offered originally by the American Quartet, and welcomed by troops who might not have looked so kindly on the unrealistic comedy of Henry Burr’s ‘Life in a Trench in Belgium’. Nor might they have appreciated the blithe propaganda of the British papers, which boasted that the Allied troops were ‘as happy as sandboys47’ as long as they could sing the choruses from the latest comic songs and hear a little ragtime.