Topic: The Ragtime Parlor

[bwv 1080]

My statement above is definitely exaggerated. I assume that by "Minstrelsy" you refer to (blackface) minstrel songs, which isn't exactly a new form of music as it is a tradition. There was also some blurring of lines around the turn of the century (i.e. compositions with the principal characteristic of ragtime -- syncopation -- could interchangeably be called minstrel songs because of their use in such shows).

It was a new form of music and the earliest written examples of the fusion of African and British folk traditions.  Several early banjo methods came out in the 1850s that collected and notated music that was being played both in Minstrel shows and by slaves and freedmen.  Its the foundation of ragtime and most all american popular music that followed

[Rosalba]

Great thread! I don't know all that much about ragtime, but I do love to listen to it. Thanks for all the links! 

Pig Ankle Rag is enjoying a vogue at present among hobby musicians here in Yorkshire. It seems that 'The first strain of the tune is based on a ragtime piece called "Pig Ankles," composed by M.E. Williams and published in 1905 (described as "A Grotesque Intermezzo")'.
https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Pig_Ankle_Rag_(1)#:~:text=The%20first%20strain%20of%20the,of%20the%20Memphis%20Jug%20Bands.

Pig Ankles, 1905.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfmhE_msLJQ

Pig Ankle Strut, 1928:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0ntq5iJuGI

Pig Ankle Rag:
This version is disgustingly short of pep, but shows the music of the tune popular at the moment:

A little brighter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX_UtSezn_0&feature=emb_title
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K62S77rCn0

[Trazom H Cab]

There is a similar form called "cakewalk" that started around 1877 and reached the heights of its popularity in the 1890s but gradually fell out in the first decade of the 20th century.  The best I can tell, cakewalk differed from ragtime in that the beats are all aligned at the start of each bar with minimal syncopation working its way in until the next bar when everything resets, as it were.   Ragtime syncopation continues throughout a piece and frequently straddles across bars.  Others say that cakewalk and ragtime are not really related and they may be right but today, we tend to lump them together.  Cakewalk was also the name of a dance and the music may have been written for it.  The dance was invented by black slaves.  They would don their Sunday finery (virtually always hand-me-downs from the master's family) and couples would strut ostentatiously in the barnyard as a dance competition.  The best dancing couple would win a huge coconut topping cake.  It was so huge, though, that everybody would help eat it.  Whites watched these dances and, for some reason, thought it was an authentic African dance (the slaves were actually poking fun at the way white people danced) and they started to do it too.  But the late 1800s, it had become a dance craze that also accompanied ragtime and then passed into early jazz.  My favorite cakewalk piece is by Sadie Koninsky from about 1897 when she was only 17--"Eli Green's Cakewalk":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L758otevsh8&ab_channel=RagtimeDorianHenry
Eli Green's Cakewalk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqpINmqxlsc&ab_channel=JiveSwing.Com
Cakewalk dancing.  Later dances such as the Lindy Hop evolved from cakewalk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD3Ybme_cdc&ab_channel=adamgswanson
Movie scene with cakewalk dancing.  The musical accompaniment is "At a Georgia Camp Meeting."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLR2ZI0evgs&ab_channel=RagtimeDorianHenry
At a Georgia Camp Meeting by Kerry Mills.  A very famous piece in the 1890s.  Mills was one of three of the best-known cakewalk composers--ironically, all were white: Mills, Abe Holzmann and J. Bodewalt Lampe.  Mills was from Ann Arbor, Michigan and spent a great deal of time in Detroit, which was a hotbed of ragtime and cakewalk, but his publishing concern was located in New York--F. A. Mills, which was his real name--Frederick Allen Mills.