But then so is ragtime, if you think about it; there is that Centaur duality to it; the alternately carefree and philosophic Archer clumsily sputtering away up front while it has that horse’s-ass backbeat clop-clop-clopping away behind...a Sagittarian music. And the fate of ragtime as a genre proved to be prophetic of the fate of all subsequent pop music in the 20th century, which itself is now thankfully screeching to a halt.

Scott’s aim was always higher than his grasp. He had one hit, “The Maple Leaf Rag,” (not “The Entertainer” aka “The Sting,” that was a dud at the time), monstrous, supposedly it was the first piece of sheet music to go platinum. It didn’t happen overnight, but success never does and it sells to this day. (A piece of sheet music cost fifty cents back then; we had $1 gold coins, too. $1 then had the purchasing power of $30 or $40 now, and that’s the kind of hit Scott had with “Maple Leaf.”) It bought him a decade or two worth of clout, and that was a Good Thing, since nothing he ever wrote afterward would be nearly as successful.

His ambitions, meanwhile, became ever more grandiose; he wrote a ballet. He followed this up with an opera. These bombed, so he went back to his rags. (Back then, ragtime was considered dirty, gutter music, a threat to the established moral order. The fact that it came from African-American guys playing in whorehouses only added fuel to the fire--let’s not belabor the obvious rap parallels, but what do you think would happen if Ice-T were to come out with an opera today?)

If by chance you’ve ever aspired to be a rock and roll piano player (even if it’s probably not even worth the bother anymore), it would behoove you to learn some ragtime first (along with some boogie-woogie and blues, but that should go without saying), because ragtime, far more so than jazz, was the direct rhythmic precursor of rock and roll: syncopation up top, backbeat down below. Ragtime predates jazz and its rhythmic figures defined the original acoustic country blues; however, that stuff was conceived with guitar-pickin’ in mind and was kept well away from the white folks.

And for good reason, too: ragtime (played on a piano or by a marching band) was just barely acceptable to the crackers. The blues would have made them go blind. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that were said about ragtime, preached from the pulpit and spread by the media. They said that it would it could cause intoxication and epileptic fits. They said it corrupted the morals of the young. They said it would make their souls fry in hell. (Where have we heard all that before?) And they were right, in a way--if any of those people could be plucked out of 1907 in mid-sentence and transported to...oh, let’s be really vicious...The Rocky Horror Picture Show, say--they would have no choice but to conclude they had died and gone to hell, and their souls would fry inside of five minutes. (On the other hand, so would Scott’s--except he would have lasted for seven or eight minutes, trying to get a handle on the music. Oh well, at least he would have outlived his critics.)

As for the shared origins of blues and ragtime and how they led to rock, it’s as simple as this: once the blues finally emerged as an instrumental style (and the earliest published blues numbers were piano rags, incidentally), all that was necessary was to double up the beat (to get away from the polka/march groove) and put it into a 12-bar-blues format. From there, all you have to do is to take it away from the piano player and divide the parts among the members of a band, and you’re within shouting distance of Chuck Berry. (For some reason it’s also true that most disco tunes make great polkas, but let’s not muddy the issue.)

So what did Scott get for his efforts? Hah! He got shit on, what did you think? That’s what happens to innovators. *sigh* Times changed. Fashions changed, and he had too much integrity to move with either the fashions or the times. He continued to crank out his rags, which were becoming heavier, more esoteric, and beyond the technical capabilities of the average sheet-music-buying caucasian. As if that weren’t bad enough, he wrote another opera. This was the last straw; no publishing company would touch it. (He’d caught syphillis back in his sporting days, and it was now in the tertiary stage, attacking his brain. You would have preferred not to shake hands with him either.) He ended up publishing the thing himself. Nobody would buy it or back it. He put on a public performance in a rented hall in Harlem. There was no band, only him at the piano--and by this point, his ability to play had been in decline for some years. It was his final, desperate gesture. The audience, of course, thought they were way hipper than old Scott: they had no time for a surrealistic plantation fable--it bombed. (Perhaps the thing is cursed like Macbeth; I’ve heard there’s never been a trouble-free production of it.)

This was the final curtain for Scott Joplin. He lost what was left of his marbles and was packed off to Bellevue, and died the day we entered World War One. Ragtime died right along with him; historically significant for (among a dozen other things, many of them alluded to right here) being the first-ever instance of a form of purely Pop music to arise in this country and then to be cannibalized by the then-nascent music industry, traded in for more accessible and commercialized bastardizations. It worked so well they’ve been doing it ever since, once every 10 years or so. Ragtime was replaced by rinky-dink popular songs, by Dixieland jazz, and by the first above-ground stirrings of the blues that would eventually redeem us all. **sigh**