Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop Music: A History

PROLOGUE

One of the things that strikes you when you look at the world at the turn of the twentieth century, on 1 January 1900, is how surprisingly modern it was. There was refrigeration, central heating, telephones; cars and aeroplanes were just around the corner. It was a different world, but still a very recognisable one. By 1900 industrial processes had begun to reshape all lives and all culture. Popular music was not immune, and it was about to be transformed.

There was mass production in all things; this was a driving force in increased piano sales in both Britain and America between 1870 and 1910. Tens of thousands of pianos in the pubs and drawing rooms of Britain were provided by massive factories in Kentish Town, north London.I

Historian Ann Douglas has said that piano literacy was almost as high as print literacy among wealthier American women. It was a sign of affluence and culture; in New York, the Gershwin family acquired a piano in 1910, which was hoisted through the window onto the second floor of their home, originally for their son Ira. As a result, in Britain and America the sheet-music industry obligingly filled a vacuum. The piano in the parlour became more viable once mass production brought down the cost of sheet music: in the 1890s it was still common for a copy of a popular song to set you back four shillings, but by 1900 you had the ‘sixpenny songsheet’.

There were record companies too, which – once someone had the bright idea to affix a piece of paper to the blank circle in the centre of a disc – also became known as record labels. Thomas Edison had discovered recorded sound in 1878, but it wasn’t until 1894 that he finally agreed that the ‘talking machine’ or ‘phonograph’ that played and recorded on wax cylinders was a medium of entertainment rather than a stenographer’s aid or dictating machine. Throughout the 1890s he was engaged in legal, patent and copyright disputes with the German-born inventor Emil Berliner, who had come up with the flat ‘gramophone’ disc. The key to making it a commercial prospect was duplication. Berliner discovered that if he made a ‘negative’ metal disc from the original recording and used this negative stamper to press records, then he could go into business. In 1901 the biggest American label, Columbia Records, which until then had been using Edison’s wax cylinders, adopted Berliner’s more convenient 78 revolutions per minute ten-inch discs, and the format of the age – right up to the rock ’n’ roll era – was set.II

The advent of recorded sound and talking machines also gave us the earliest days of the music press. Early gramophone magazines, when sales of 78s were low and slow, read much the same as they would in the 1960s. Phonoscope (US, 1896), Sound Wave and Talking Machine News (UK, both 1906) all featured lists of new releases and reviews of this week’s 78s, and they give a strong idea of what ‘popular music’ meant at the dawn of the recording industry: band favourites, military and otherwise; classical orchestral music; arias, operas, operettas and other musical shows; banjo duets; music-hall and minstrel songs; gospel; and, then as ever, popular ballads. Whistling solos were big at the turn of the century, as were vaudeville comedy routines. Recordings were apparently used in American schools to provide rhythms for marches, parades and assemblies.

1894 saw the first edition of an American trade magazine called The Billboard, a ‘monthly resume of all that is new, bright and interesting on the boards’. It wasn’t initially set up with the intention of covering the nascent music industry, which it didn’t venture into until 1904, but was instead ‘devoted to the interests of advertisers, poster printers, bill posters, advertising agents, and secretaries of fairs’. It included a page of ‘Bill Room Gossip’ – by 1897 renamed ‘Stage Gossip’ – which paved the way for what would later inform and dominate the British and American music press.

Popular music wasn’t invented with the gramophone and the 78. The first truly American songwriter, and one not scared to write about current affairs, was probably John Hill Hewitt, who wrote the most popular song of the 1820s, ‘The Minstrel’s Return’d from the War’, about a soldier torn between his girl and his country (150 years later, its theme would be revived on ‘Billy Don’t Be a Hero’, a transatlantic number one). Hewitt was quick to spot a trend, making him the first recognisable writer of American popular song. Opera was having a moment in the 1830s? He wrote ‘Gardé Vous’, for an operetta called The Prisoner of Rochelle. Swiss yodelling families were taking America by storm in the 1840s? Hewitt swiftly produced ‘The Alpine Horn’ in 1844.

Most of Hewitt’s songs are barely remembered today, but Stephen Foster’s are: ‘O Susanna’, ‘Camptown Races’, ‘Swanee River’, ‘Beautiful Dreamer’. It’s hard to believe they were actually written, with a pen and ink, by a human being, and not just plucked from a tree. ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, especially, is ageless; if you were told it had been written in the 1930s by Rodgers and Hart, or in the 1960s by Sedaka and Greenfield, you wouldn’t flinch. Foster wrote it in 1862, a couple of years before he died. That was also the year in which the first stretch of the Thames embankment was built; a law was passed in Britain that meant violent robbery was to be punishable by flogging; and dear Otto von Bismarck gave his ‘blood and iron’ speech about unifying Germany. Lord Palmerston was prime minister, meaning any public house called the Lord Palmerston had yet to be built. It was a very long time ago. (It was also the year George ‘Geordie’ Ridley first sang ‘Blaydon Races’ at Balmbra’s Music Hall in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but more of that later.)

Foster was the first writer of songs that were recognisably pop, tunes that would later be performed by Nat King Cole, the Byrds, Bing Crosby, the Beach Boys, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charles Ives, Mavis Staples, John Prine, Bob Dylan, Foghorn Leghorn and the Beatles, without anyone noticing that they were more than a hundred years old. Foster even looks modern in photos. He tried to make a living as a professional songwriter when no such profession existed. John Hill Hewitt had taught young ladies how to play piano and written songs in his spare time, but Foster was determined to be an innovator. Unfortunately, his sheet music would be published by several different companies, and – still some decades away from secure publishing copyrights – there was little Foster could do to stop it. He couldn’t phone a rogue publisher in New York and ask what the hell was going on, because there was no such thing as a phone. Instead, he moved from Pennsylvania to New York, sold his songs for a pittance and fell into poverty. One day, he slipped badly and hit the sink in his Bowery lodgings, gouging his head. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but they couldn’t save him because there were no blood transfusions yet, nor antibiotics. A man out of time, Foster died broke, aged thirty-seven, in January 1864.

New Yorkers Alexander and Thomas Harms set up one of the very first American music publishing companies in 1875. T. B. Harms & Co. stood out as it proudly sold contemporary popular music, rather than religious or classical, and sold it well. The success of songs like Paul Dresser’s ‘The Letter That Never Came’ (1886) led other publishers to open offices near the Harms brothers, in and around Lower Manhattan’s Union Square. Max Dreyfus, who worked as an arranger for the brothers, bought them out in 1904 but kept the name, going on to turn T. B. Harms & Co. Inc. into a Broadway institution as the publisher for Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter. At one point in the 1930s the company would publish around 90 per cent of Broadway’s scores and show tunes.

In 1893 a Milwaukee songwriter called Charles K. Harris wrote a maudlin ballad about a couple’s misunderstanding called ‘After the Ball’ and thought it had potential. Rather than sell it to the likes of T. B. Harms for an 85 cent payment, he published the song himself and then set about badgering established singers into performing it. First, it was shoehorned into an existing but failing show called A Trip to Chinatown, single-handedly transforming the musical into a hit. As a result, ‘After the Ball’ became the first sheet-music million-seller.

Harris had started out with a little talent and a lot of neck. At the age of eighteen he had set up his own music publishing company at 207 Grand Avenue in Milwaukee. Outside hung a sign that proclaimed: ‘Charles K. Harris, banjoist and songwriter. Songs written to order.’ When John Philip Sousa’s military band played ‘After the Ball’ every day during a six-week engagement at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the song’s popularity snowballed, and Harris decided to move his office to New York. The continued success of ‘After the Ball’ was powerful enough to inspire other songwriters to do the same. Among his cheeky innovations, Harris was probably the first publisher to include a photograph of the singer on his sheet music. This both appealed to consumers and massaged the egos of the performers, endearing Harris to them even more.

The Wild West feel of the nascent American music industry, where foreign songs were routinely pirated and royalties were the stuff of myth, had come to an end with the International Copyright Act of 1891, otherwise known as the ‘Chace Act’. One of the first songs to benefit was ‘The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, written by one Fred Gilbert, who sold it for £50 to the singer who made it famous in Britain, Charles Coborn. William ‘Old Hoss’ Hoey met Coborn on a trip to London and brought it back to the States, where his hoarse rasp of a voice made it an American hit. Coborn’s £50 was well spent: he made thousands from the song.

These new hummable, disposable songs were commercial and intended to squash the old established musics. The classical canon, folk songs and ballads were now competing with, and being crowded out by, the din of professional songwriters in the district of lower Manhattan that became known as Tin Pan Alley. This was popular music, mass-produced to order. It was ‘pop’.

I

. A large piano showroom still existed on the corner of Highgate Road and Kentish Town Road as recently as the 1990s. It is now a cab office.

II

. Originally, in 1888, Berliner had made zinc discs coated with a fatty film; the surface was switched to black wax, then hard rubber, and finally to shellac discs – basically, the hardened secretions of beetles – in 1897. 78s were still prevalent in Britain until 1960. Cliff Richard’s first half-dozen singles were issued as 78s, as well as on the increasingly popular 45 rpm seven-inch format. 78s survived into the mid-1960s in India, with Beatles songs like ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘Michelle’ appearing on what looked like a disc from a bygone age.

1

1900: POP IN THE BEGINNING

Henry T. Finck, a forty-five-year-old critic for the New York Evening Post, was a Wagner man. He didn’t like popular music, parlour songs or even whistling in the street, and in February 1900 he made an acute, if heavy-hearted, observation about the coming century. ‘One afternoon, while I was watering flowers in the back yard, a boy in the street whistled a tune I had not heard before.’ While Finck screwed his eyes up and scowled at its ‘offensive vulgarity’, he also felt ‘certain I should hear it a thousand times during the summer. And my prophetic soul divined the truth. In the course of a week or two every boy in town was whistling that tune, every other man humming it, and every tenth woman playing it on the piano.’ It was, Finck hissed, ‘like an epidemic’. The song he heard was a ‘hit’, and for a couple of months it would be inescapable, locally and nationally. With communication getting ever faster and songwriting becoming more industrialised, this was how music would work in the new century, whether Henry T. Finck liked it or not. Hits of the day, here today and – on the whole – gone tomorrow. Just as algorithms would scare people in the twenty-first century, music lovers in 1900 worried about how organisations and capital were mass-producing music which fed on fads and left little to chance.

The first use of the word ‘pop’ appeared in an advert in the British theatrical trade paper The Stage in 1901. It ran: ‘WANTED Managers to apply at once to the London Music Lending Library, the largest and best lib. in the world. All the latest Pop. Music. ALGERNON CLARKE proprietor, 18 Lonsdale Road, Barnes SW13.’ It was a handy shortening; the full stop was there to make it snappier, and cheaper to print, than ‘popular’. That it appeared in a London publication was not an accident: in 1900 American pop culture barely existed. So how did the twentieth century quickly become the American century? The answer will involve youth and renewal and modernity, plus a degree of class warfare. None of this would have seemed at all clear in 1900, with popular music in the US still largely in thrall to the most flowery of old-world values, producing home-grown operetta hits like Victor Herbert’s ‘Gypsy Love Song’ (aka ‘Slumber On, My Little Gypsy Sweetheart’). In some corners of the US something new and wild was stirring, as we’ll soon discover, but as yet it wasn’t widely known on the streets of New York or Chicago or San Francisco.

What music was genuinely popular in 1900? There were hymns and there was folk music that went back generations; there was music hall and panto in Britain; there was vaudeville and minstrelsy in America; there was parlour music, operetta and musical theatre; and there were also marching bands. There was no fundamental split between classical and popular music. The great composers and the great singers – Tauber, Caruso – could dip into the popular idiom any time they felt like swimming in a public pool. Both were annotated the same way in sheet music; both could be interpreted by any performer, it just depended on how capable you were.

What kind of popular music soundtracked the late Victorian age? Britain being Britain, in 1900 the popular music you heard, and where you heard it, depended entirely on class distinctions: for the upper classes, the aristocracy of light music was Johann Strauss; Gilbert and Sullivan were for the upper middle class, something to aspire to; the Gaiety Theatre shows of impresario George Edwardes, frothy musical comedies, were strictly middle-class; below that, there was a grading down through brass bands and Sousa marches and, eventually, music hall – the folk music of the urban working class.

People who didn’t give two hoots about class distinctions were to be found in the halls, mimicking their betters with songs like ‘Burlington Bertie’ and ‘Champagne Charlie’. Some intellectuals preferred the grit of music hall to the powdered safety of musical theatre and light opera. Ford Maddox Ford edited The English Review from a box at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. G. K. Chesterton wrote that ‘The most serious things we have left are the comic songs.’ But in the wider social scheme, where did music hall sit? The Irish dilettante George Moore said: ‘The music hall is a protest against the wearisome stories concerning wills and misers. It is a protest against the immense drawing room sets, the rich hangings, the velvet sofas. It is a protest against the villa, the circulating library and the club.’ In other words, it was a protest against what was becoming known as ‘musical comedy’.

Everyone played instruments and sang. At the local pub, everyone joined in, so it didn’t matter if you couldn’t sing. Old ladies played the harp at recitals, where cultural weight might be added by ponderous parlour songs like ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, which was loosely adapted from a Tennyson poem. On the streets of London there were barrel organs that sounded like hundred-year-old spirits. On the streets of Bradford there were brass and silver bands; in 1895 alone, there had been 222 brass band competitions in England. It wasn’t just the north. Among the hundreds of kids in London’s East End who grew up hearing both German and Salvation Army bands was Freddie Ricketts, from the particularly poverty-ridden district of Ratcliff, who was inspired to join an army band. In 1914, having ditched his none-more-cockney name for the more classless Kenneth Alford, he wrote ‘Colonel Bogey’. It became a sheet-music million-seller and was adapted during World War II as ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’, before becoming the theme to the 1957 movie Bridge on the River Kwai and a Top 20 American hit for Mitch Miller a year later.I

‘Colonel Bogey’ is an early example of popular music’s longevity and time-travelling potential: you can follow it from the street-world of pub pianos, past the omnipresent marching bands, right through modern military nostalgia and into 1985’s Brat Pack movie The Breakfast Club, in which the kids in detention whistle it. More recently, it has become a jingle for a digestif in Germany. Much of 1900’s popular music is forgotten, but the marching band had legs.

Music hall was at its zenith in 1900. It was the great working-class art – its singers, writers, even its impresarios were working-class. Songs dealt with the stuff of everyday life, the secret source of most great pop music. There were songs for the homeless (Morny Cash’s ‘I Live in Trafalgar Square’ – ‘with four lions to guard me’), the poor (Ella Shields’s ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’) or families overrun by children (a late entry, Lily Morris’s 1927 hit ‘Don’t Have Any More, Mrs Moore’). The Victorian idea of charity was inclined to split couples and put them into different workhouses; this horror became the subject matter of Albert Chevalier’s ‘My Old Dutch’.II

Grim reality was put to words and music. Almost nothing was out of bounds.

The queen of the halls was Hoxton’s Marie Lloyd, thirty years old at the turn of the new century, who was sadly never recorded but made sauciness into an art form. With slightly crooked teeth, round cheeks and large, sad eyes, she wasn’t an obvious star, but her high-kicking songs and daring deliveries were dazzling. The writer Compton Mackenzie recalled going to see her in the 1890s. She was kitted out ‘in a cream dress with a cloud of amber underclothes. She sang and danced to Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay. It was highly respectable, there was hardly any leg distinguishable at all above the knee. I was rather shaken by the freedom with which she was kicking her legs about, particularly as my grim old nurse was present. I turned to [my friend] and said She’s showing her drawers which really was a frightful thing… Even until the first world war, I couldn’t have told that story in public.’

Gus Elen, born in Pimlico in 1862, had made a living packing eggs for the Co-Op before he took to the stage. He made a science of complaining – ‘It’s a Great Big Shame’ (1895), ‘If It Wasn’t for the Houses in Between’ (1899) – the great essayist Max Beerbohm writing that Elen ‘too much resembles real life to be wholly pleasurable’. Sam Mayo, nicknamed ‘The Immobile One’, had an almost cosmic glumness, and his recordings had some of the best titles in music hall: ‘Rabbit and Pickled Pork’, ‘I Feel Very Bad I Do’ and ‘Things Are Worse in Russia’. Mayo created a record by playing nine halls in one night in 1905, and died in 1938 while playing billiards – a very music-hall way to go. Performing in blackface, Eugene Stratton scored one of the biggest hits of the new century with ‘Lily of Laguna’ (‘I know she likes me, I know she likes me, because she says so’), which showed that music hall could be just as sentimental as operetta in its own way. You want full, teary-eyed music hall? Marie Lloyd’s ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ was a great big love-in for the entire scene. Cheeriness against all odds, that was the appeal.

Music hall’s popularity had grown in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as acts began to tour the country. From the 1880s chains of halls run by the likes of Oswald Stoll and the Moss–Thornton group began to push smaller, purely proletarian venues out of business.III

Stars were still made in London, and agents and writers had to move there to make their name, but by 1900 Marie Lloyd’s songs would be as well known in Heckmondwike or Hetton-le-Hole as they were in Hoxton. The first publication devoted entirely to music hall, The Magnet, had been published in Leeds in the 1860s; growth was steady enough that halls were built for the first time in the relatively large towns of Dewsbury and Keighley in 1901, while The Magnet could advertise fifteen halls in Barnsley alone as late as 1913. The popularity of family-friendly pantomime, revived commercially in the 1880s by Augustus ‘Druriolanus’ Harris, had also brought in a more middle-class crowd, which served only to swell the numbers.

The promoter George Edwardes, owner of the West End’s Gaiety Theatre, had struck gold when he switched from burlesque and comic opera in the 1890s and introduced the Edwardian musical comedy – a mad perfumed world of romantic melodies, light songs, small plots and large hats. These shows were also notable for the hour-glass figures of leading ladies such as Ruby Miller, who remembered Edwardes’s ‘kindly blue eyes’. It was all extraordinarily polite – beautiful girls, suitably buttoned-up and demure – and the songs had powder-puff titles like ‘What Did the Butler See’ and ‘Moonstruck’. These confections were inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan, but were made entirely of icing.

The big musical comedy hit of 1900 was Florodora, with words and music by Leslie Stuart. Its songs included ‘I Want to Be a Military Man’ (be careful what you wish for, Victorian England), ‘The Flowers Are Blooming So Gay’ (which could have been a line from Oklahoma!) and ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden’. The latter wasn’t much of a song, but the show stole a trick from vaudeville and the halls: when the song was performed, a bevy of beauties were brought onto the stage, twirling their parasols and fluttering their eyelashes. For the target audience, this was something quite new. Like Gilbert and Sullivan’s shows, Florodora transferred to Broadway to become an even bigger hit, its legend stretching all the way to 1930, when it was celebrated in an early Hollywood musical, The Florodora Girl. ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden’ might sound as if it was written by a small soft toy, but – hey! – look at those bloomers! Florodora soundalike tunes proliferated for the rest of the decade. Even at this stage, popular music was a battleground for musical adventurers and bread-head reactionaries, but in the world of musical comedy, it wouldn’t always be easy to tell the good guys from the baddies, as we’ll see.

By 1900 the satire of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas had been largely replaced by the sugary world of the musical comedy. Sullivan died just as the century was born, but W. S. Gilbert continued to be a source of inspiration to younger lyric writers like P. G. Wodehouse, who remembered: ‘I was taking lunch at his home in Harrow Weald. He was a great raconteur, and was telling a very long story, one of those stories where you make it as dull as possible up to the punchline, when everyone collapses and roars with laughter. There was a pause before the punchline. It didn’t seem funny, but I thought it must be funny because it was Gilbert. I laughed, and he gave me the dirtiest look. I never saw anyone look so furious.’

Gilbert had taken operetta and made the lyric-writing key, creating a new popular art form. ‘I know nothing about music,’ he once claimed. ‘I can’t tell the difference between Rule Britannia and Pop Goes the Weasel.’ Nevertheless, he must have blanched at Edwardes’s barely middlebrow offerings. Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton were Edwardes’s chief composers for the Gaiety shows, which all translated across the Atlantic. Caryll would buy plays from France, write music for them, take them to director Florenz Ziegfeld on Broadway and tell him that they wouldn’t come cheap because the authors needed paying. Caryll, naturally, had already bought sole rights for himself and was robbing Ziegfeld blind.

Londoners didn’t always get away with it. When the actor Seymour Hicks ‘borrowed’ some of his best lines for Edwardes’s show The Shop Girl from America after he’d played there in 1895, the papers were ready for him on his next trip, nicknaming him ‘Stealmore Tricks’. ‘Comedians beware!’ warned Variety. ‘Stealmore Tricks is in town. Padlock your gags! Lock up your jokes!’ But at the beginning of the new century the middle-class Englishman could ride roughshod over the American immigrant, safe in the knowledge that this was the natural order of things.

In the US, 1899’s big hit had been Paul Dresser’s panoramic ‘On the Banks of the Wabash’, its ‘new mown hay, sycamore, candlelight gleaming’ sounding endlessly romantic to the growing number of city dwellers. One of the first heart-tuggers of its kind, ‘On the Banks of the Wabash’ glorified America in a brazenly sentimental way. By the turn of the century there were dozens of similar self-mythologising American songs, even though the West was still fairly wild. Mark Twain – no stranger to mixing sentimentality and American dust himself – said that in 1900 Virginia City had ‘half a dozen jails, and some talk of building a church’.

‘On the Banks of the Wabash’ was also a pointer to the ruthless nature of the American music industry. In the British music halls, audiences would be encouraged to sing along with the choruses; once a song was a hit, no coaxing was necessary. This idea was borrowed by the nascent American music industry. Song pluggers would turn up with pianos – at racetracks, in parks, at political rallies, in factories, even at army training camps – and pass out chorus slips printed with lyrics to encourage singalongs. This also allowed shy listeners to hear the new songs and take home a piece of paper which mentioned the title and publisher of the song. From the start, pop music would be about interaction between the industry and the public.

Take the jukebox, a staple of American pop culture, which has its roots in the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph invented by Louis Glass, the general manager of the San Francisco-based Pacific Phonograph Company. This was an Edison wax cylinder phonograph that you stuck a coin in before putting something that looked like a stethoscope in your ears, and the very first machine was installed at the city’s Palais Royal Saloon at 303 Sutter Street in November 1889. Very soon, they could be found at fairgrounds and amusement arcades, and on the Oakland to San Francisco ferry. Four different people could listen to your selection without disturbing anyone else; it was as much a primitive Walkman as a jukebox. The nickel-in-the-slot had no amplification, and the cylinders had to be changed every day as they wore out so fast. The sound quality must have been painfully poor. No matter: at Chicago’s first annual Convention of Local Phonograph Companies of the United States in 1890, the inventor and patent-holder Louis Glass claimed that his invention had already brought in more than $4,000. By 1900 there were plenty more nickels in his nickelodeon.

Vaudeville – a form of variety theatre with a dozen or so separate acts sharing a bill – was the American equivalent of music hall.IV

And in 1900 the biggest craze in vaudeville was the ‘coon song’, which had first come to prominence in the mid-1880s and was still prevalent. The illusion of the South as a serene, happy Eden for all – typified by Stephen Foster songs like ‘Old Folks at Home’ and ‘Camptown Races’ – had been ruined by the civil war of 1861 to 1865. With the mass movement of the South’s black population to the northern cities, nineteenth-century minstrelsy’s good-time racial stereotypes of watermelons, corn and banjos were replaced with something worse. The black caricature instead portrayed them as dumb, indolent, dishonest and ‘new in town’, an unwanted foreign presence. Hits of the 1890s and early 1900s included ‘New Coon in Town’, ‘No Coons Allowed’, ‘I Wonder What the Coon’s Game Is’ and the 1901 singalong ‘Every Race Has a Flag But the Coon’.V

The lyrics mocked African Americans’ aspirations to a place in society, and became more violent near the turn of the century, with songs like Charles Trevathan’s ‘The Bully’. This was a major hit in 1896 for Scots Canadian ‘coon shouter’ May Irwin,VI

who sang it in a show called The Widow Jones: ‘I’m a-lookin’ for that bully and I’ll make him bow… Took along my trusty blade to carve that fella’s bones, just a-lookin’ for that bully, hear his groans.’ The violence in the lyrics was usually meted out on the black characters, but the implication that these violent interlopers walked the streets of the North was clear.

What separates the emergent world of pop music in 1900 from its twenty-first-century descendant? Most significantly, it was not associated with youth culture, because youth culture as we know it simply didn’t exist.VII

There was no such thing as a teenager; in Britain, fifteen- and fifty-year-olds alike were spending their wages on a Saturday night watching the same turns at the same music halls. Most teenagers would have been in full-time employment since the age of twelve: boys labouring or down the pits; girls in domestic service, both in mills and factories.

Henry T. Finck’s prophetic outburst on whistling in the street was probably unwitting; he was snobbishly reacting against an old-world version of popular music that was now being streamlined and intensified by the industrialisation of culture. Still, it hinted at an awareness of new distinctive elements that would soon remake American music. The contrasts between Britain and America were about to be amplified by the recording industry, and by Europe’s slowness in coming to terms with the end of empire. Patriotism had begun to affect music hall in 1900. Songs were written to reflect the emotions of war; in the short term the messy Boer War that ran from 1899 to 1902 – ‘England’s Bit of Bunting’, ‘A Mother’s Gift to Her Country’, ‘The Boers Have Got My Daddy’. People began to forsake the hearts and flowers of the Victorian era in a dry run for the complete takeover of the British music industry fifteen years hence. With these sabre-rattling songs, Britain was marching gloriously into its own past.

Without a pointless war to hold it back, and with the popularity of coon songs on the wane,VIII

American popular music, starry-eyed and laughing, could look to the future. Will Marion Cook’s all-black musical Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk had opened on Broadway in 1898. ‘Negroes are at last on Broadway, and here to stay!’ claimed the exuberant composer. ‘My chorus sang like Russians, dancing meanwhile like Negroes, and cakewalking like angels, black angels!’ Cook had studied under Dvořák, and later brought the jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet over to England; for this kindness alone he deserves a statue. Meanwhile, minstrel show music had mutated and now concentrated on the luxurious steamboats that paddled up and down the Mississippi, ending in New Orleans – the Paris of the New World. It was here and upstream in Sedalia, Missouri, that the first truly American popular music was germinating.

I

. Alford was stationed at Fort George in the Highlands in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of World War I. One morning he was playing golf, when his opponent whistled two notes instead of calling ‘Fore!’. The inventive Alford finished the whistled melody on the spot and named the tune ‘Colonel Bogey’, after the Edwardian golfer’s fictional foe, the spirit of the course. The colonel may be forgotten, but ‘bogey’ is still a golfing term.

II

. Music hall’s origins lie in the Theatres Act of 1843. Prior to that, only the royal theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden were allowed to show plays; everybody else had to make do with charity benefits or musicals – in other words, variety shows. After the Act, the theatres could at last put on Shakespeare (this had previously been an offence punishable by closure). With relish, the taverns took on the variety turns that the theatres abandoned, opening a music room or song-saloon in a space adjacent to the pub. ‘Every publican’, wrote Willson Disher, ‘would now try to lay violent hands on the building next door, whether workshop or stable-yard, school or church. No opera house was too grand for the purpose, no shanty too mean.’ The Grapes in Southwark Bridge Road was the first tavern to coin the term ‘music hall’ when its ‘Grand Harmonic Hall’ was re-christened the Surrey Music Hall in 1850.

III

. By 1914 just sixteen syndicates owned 140 halls, roughly two-thirds of the total nationwide.

IV

. The impresario Tony Pastor had opened his first ‘Opera House’ on the Bowery in 1865, before moving up to a more respectable stretch of Broadway. His variety shows had middle-class sensibilities – no liquor, no obscenities – and he began calling them ‘vaudeville’ rather than ‘variety’ in 1876. Prior to Pastor’s taming of variety, medicine shows and ‘Wild West’ travelling acts had provided a similar blend of music, comedy, jugglers and novelty performers to a less urbanised America.

V

. By 1920 there was a red, black and green pan-African flag, hoisted by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. One of the main reasons for its existence was to shut down the still-popular ‘Every Race Has a Flag But the Coon’.

VI

. Women were discouraged from comedic vaudeville performances. A peculiar way around this was the development of ‘coon shouters’: white women – usually plus-size – who roared out songs that were either parodies of black masculinity or sexually suggestive. They rarely performed in blackface, which highlighted their exclusion from minstrelsy. Coon shouters who went on to become beloved entertainers included May Irwin, Mae West and Sophie Tucker.

VII

. America was willing it into existence, though. Youth as a driving value had been part of the American landscape since New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley had written, ‘Go west, young man!’ in 1865, leading to the long-held belief that California was for the young.

VIII

. It may have dropped in popularity, possibly due to the growing violence in its lyrics, but the coon song didn’t go away. The banjo player sometimes called ‘the grandfather of country music’, Uncle Dave Macon, recorded ‘New Coon in Town’ as late as 1929.

2

ELITE SYNCOPATIONS: SCOTT JOPLIN AND RAGTIME

Ragtime was America’s pulse. It just took a while for Americans to find it.

In 1900 European music, whether Mozart or Marie Lloyd, was the real thing as far as New York was concerned; American music was as nothing, trivial, an embarrassment. To get over this hump, and for twentieth-century pop to begin, white America had to acknowledge that African American music existed. Enter ragtime. In contrast to the family of musics that were merely popular, ragtime was identifiably ‘pop’. Emerging in the last years of the nineteenth century, it was urban, it was democratic, it was innovative and it had a strong African American influence. It had a beat, it had syncopation. All of these things were unusual.

Ragtime set the template for every successive twentieth-century pop boom. For a start, it immediately made you want to dance. This really wasn’t true of Victorian parlour songs or Sousa marches or music hall or even Viennese waltzes. Toe-tappers didn’t really exist before ragtime. Secondly, the heyday of classic ragtime had the lifespan of a butterfly; it would be messed about with and commercialised, to the horror of its originators, but to the benefit of pop’s advancement. Thirdly, it didn’t have rules (even though some people did write ragtime rule books), because no one wanted ragtime to be homework; it was fun, it was anti-snob, it was the soundtrack to good times. Fourthly, it was a threat – to morals, to public decency, and most of all to other musicians. Most significantly, it was a black music that would be transformed by the music industry, rewritten – with both zip and slightness – into a more digestible, more widely appreciated form.

It was also a target for the press, and music-hall songs ridiculed it. It was supposedly a flash in the pan – so why wouldn’t it just go away? Ragtime, once it became a piano-based music, also attracted women to compose popular songs, since the piano in the home was primarily there for wives and children. In addition, it crossed music’s racial borders, which in the nineteenth century had been rigid and ugly. Ragtime was, at heart, instrumental, and so it was open to blacks, whites, professionals and amateurs alike. Lastly, it had pop’s first tragic figure, its own lost boy, the beautiful mind which could take no more. For James Carr or Donny Hathaway, Nick Drake or Kurt Cobain, read Scott Joplin. He felt the full prejudicial headwind for black composers. The pervasive legacy of minstrelsy and the coon song would provide the dark floor for Americans in the American century, and Joplin, ragtime’s greatest figure, would become its saddest victim. As well as many of the good things to come in pop, the ragtime era also highlighted how black America would struggle to impose itself, would see its culture nipped and tucked by the music industry, and would watch any potential profits inevitably go elsewhere.

Where did ragtime come from? Geographically, the Mississippi basin in the 1890s. Like New York’s Tin Pan Alley a couple of decades on, and Liverpool’s Merseybeat in the 1960s, it was a result of immigration and trade creating a fluid society with a need for innovation to make ends meet.

Why did it catch fire? What set it apart from the popular music that had gone before? Rhythm – the explicit beat, America’s heartbeat – was everything in this new music. You could play behind it, melodies and harmonies could twist around it, and the key word was ‘syncopation’ – in other words, putting an irregular beat over a regular beat. In ragtime the melody itself was fully syncopated; tune and rhythm were inseparable. It used oompah basslines taken from marching music and set melodies against them in ‘ragged time’, breaking free of conventional Western bar structures. In the European tradition, percussion had always been an afterthought.

Syncopation was created by the pianist’s left hand creating a regular ‘boom-chick boom-chick’ rhythmic melody to get you on your feet. So completely did its relentless, euphoric sound mesmerise a turn-of-the-century audience used to maudlin ballads and cartoonish depictions of black entertainers that ‘ragtime’ was in the dictionary by 1902 – a ‘rag-time girl’ being either a ‘sweetheart’ or a ‘harlot’. All ways up, ragtime signified fun.I

The written and recorded form would be the making of ragtime, its mass-produced driver. If it lost a little in translation from the bordello to the page, or from the bar-room to the studio and ultimately onto a shellac 78, then that was part of what made it new, industrialised and American. These ephemeral distortions were an essential part of what made it pop.

In the beginning you could hear it only in bars and bordellos. It was true tenderloin music. The first man to try and capture it from the smoky air, to write ragtime music down on paper, was Ben Harney, who had been born on a riverboat somewhere between Louisville, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 1872. Harney was white. He didn’t invent ragtime and didn’t claim to be the ‘father of ragtime’ (though he didn’t mind too much when he was publicised as such), but he thought of himself as an adoptive parent. In 1896 the sheet music for Harney’s ‘You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon but You Done Broke Down’ stated that he was the ‘Original Introducer to the Stage of the Now Popular Rag Time in Ethiopian Song’. Harney moved to New York in 1896 and became a regular at Tony Pastor’s 14th Street Theatre, where the New York Clipper wrote that he ‘jumped into immediate favour through the medium of his genuinely clever plantation negro imitations and excellent piano playing’. Before the year was out, the ‘rag time pianist’ had also played the Weber and Fields Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House, spreading the popularity of ragtime music like jam. He published his Rag Time Instructor in 1897. A white man who could shout the blues, who wrote and produced an all-black variety show called Ragtime Reception, Harney was a groundbreaker and was appreciated as such. Until the rise of Al Jolson in the 1910s, he was also the highest-paid popular musician in America.

The ‘rules’ of ragtime would become part of its marketing. A Swede called Axel Christensen set up a school in Chicago that offered ‘ragtime taught in ten lessons’. He may as well have added, ‘and then you can get the money, and then you get the girls’. The ragtime pianist was the thing to be, and Christensen would end up as the ‘dean of ragtime’, with more than fifty schools across the States. ‘In 1902 and 1903 there was no accepted method or system of playing ragtime. No two pianists ever played syncopated numbers alike,’ he claimed, quite proud that he had brought some order and clarity to proceedings. Ragtime’s high-pop crossover would be where the music took off. Its specific technique would turn out to be nowhere near as powerful as the unhitched idea of ragtime.

An absolute precursor of ragtime was bandleader John Philip Sousa. Many rags would basically be marches composed for the piano, with added syncopation.

There may have been no acclaimed indigenous American music in 1900, but recognisable styles were emerging, and the most popular music that could be called ‘American’ was that of the marching band. The most primitive early data for record sales in the 1890s have Sousa at number one for pretty much the entire decade. Among the most instantly recognisable tunes are ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, ‘The Washington Post’ and ‘The Liberty Bell’, which had an afterlife as the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In 1868, aged thirteen, Sousa had tried to run away to join a circus band; instead, his father enlisted him as an apprentice in the United States Marine Band. The boy did well and ended up running the Marine Band from 1880 to 1892, but only recorded with them for the last two years. That didn’t stop them cutting 229 titles for Columbia in those two years. Whether Sousa made it to the studio or not, they bore his name, an early trademark of distinction in the fledgling record industry. In spite of the fame and prestige that records brought him, he didn’t like them, coining the phrase ‘canned music’ to describe them. Possibly with his military hat on, in 1906 he wrote: ‘Canned music is as incongruous by a campfire as canned salmon by a trout stream.’ To give Sousa his due, his thin, acoustic recordings must have sounded as awe-inspiring as tinned pilchards compared to the pumping presence of a real live band. Either way, there are more than a thousand recordings listed in the Sousa Band discography.

As well as providing circus tent ‘screamers’,II

military music was also seen as suitable for dancing, and Sousa provided both ‘two-steps’ (‘Washington Post’, from 1889, and ‘Triton March’, from 1896) and ‘cakewalks’ (borrowed from African American culture). Not satisfied with being the king of popular music, he decided to take his work into the realm of the classical. This would become a regular move for popular musicians who had reached the top of the tree, from Scott Joplin to George Gershwin to Paul McCartney, but Sousa was the first. He worked on suites, beginning with The Last Days of Pompeii in 1893, and following it with At the King’s Court (1904) and Dwellers of the Western World (1910). Just to remind us that these were less enlightened times and that even the lowest socially acceptable popular culture was still entirely white, the Dwellers suite was divided into three movements: ‘The Red Man’ is itchy, like skittering mice or cartoon-baddie music; ‘The White Man’ is stately, regal, impossible to dance to, more there to accompany the swishing of gowns; ‘The Black Man’ is at least recognisably southern, a cakewalk, and easily the catchiest piece. But by 1910 Sousa would have struggled to hide his source material.

As fashions changed, the military bands adapted. The Victor Recording Company’s house Military Band would be put to use on a bunch of dance records from 1911, as the turkey trot, tango and foxtrot were introduced to America in the immediate pre-war years. The record labels dictated their purpose, stating ‘for dancing’, ‘trot or one step’ and even – in a proto-disco move, pre-dating beats per minute – ‘60 bars per minute’. The Victor Military Band cut the first recorded version of W. C. Handy’s ‘St Louis Blues’, as well as Eubie Blake’s ‘Bugle Call Rag’ and patriotic numbers like the Caruso-written ‘Liberty Forever’. They fell from favour only when the viola-and-piano-led society orchestras, like those of Victor’s Joseph C. Smith and James Reese Europe, became more fashionable at dances in around 1916, ushering in the 1920s sounds of Paul Whiteman and Isham Jones. By the time electric recording arrived in the mid-’20s – a means of truly communicating a marching band’s power – military bands were seen as antiques, a relic of a pre-war, more militarily innocent age. The Victor Military Band’s last record was released in 1919, but they’d had a pretty good run.

Before ragtime appeared as sheet music, there for posterity and archival hounds like me, it went undocumented; there was no Cecil Sharp or John Lomax lurking in saloons and bordellos to record whatever the pianist was playing.III

Every saloon bar in America had a piano, which provided a ready source of employment for anyone who could play it. Usually, they would try and blend into the wallpaper, playing familiar tunes and never refusing a punter’s request. Somehow, freelance itinerants invented the style, playing whatever bawdy noise suited their surroundings, but it was Scott Joplin who decided it was something more than a soundtrack for boozing, scrapping, ogling and groping.

Joplin was pop music’s original Entertainer. His ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ was published by the local sheet-music publisher, John Stark, in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1899,IV

and it was the first piece of sheet music to sell a million copies. It was stately, but it had an unmistakable wink; it was sweet, but genuinely uplifting – it made you want to hold your head high. Also, it was incredibly catchy, what music-lovers a hundred years on would call an earworm. Alongside the murk, morbidity and melted butter of turn-of-the-century American balladry, it came across like a freshwater fountain. Stark took the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ two hundred miles east, to St Louis, where he sold half a million copies of it and started a craze which went national, then international. It was the biggest ragtime hit of all. More than Ben Harney, more than anyone else, Joplin was the genre’s creator and its leading light, and his ‘The Entertainer’, published in 1901, would sell two million copies as the theme from 1973’s The Sting. There’s longevity for you.V

Yet ragtime’s agency would be constantly doubted. There are no contemporary accounts praising a bright new musical genre, just queries over how ‘real’ it was. In this way, too, it broke fresh ground: more than a century on, pop is still confronted with questions of authenticity, seriousness, whether it’s too mechanised, whether it lacks heart. Fun, especially populist fun, isn’t enough for some people. While he conceded the music was ‘brimming over with life’, novelist Arnold Bennett described ragtime as ‘the music of the hustler, of the feverishly active speculator, of the skyscraper and the grain elevator’. All of this and more was thrown at ragtime, and Scott Joplin bore the brunt of it.

Joplin was responsible for making ragtime the first true American music, and his tunes gave it lasting significance. He had been born in Texas in 1868, the son of a former slave, and played the piano from an early age. By the time he was in his teens he was playing across the Midwest in boarding houses, casinos and bars. The first pop music would be born, like so many later genres, in the underworld.

Many American cities had a ‘tenderloin’ district where men and women, blacks and whites could mix freely. Joplin found himself in Sedalia. It was a railroad town, and so had a pretty lively nightlife. It also had a college for black students, where Joplin would learn advanced counterpoint by day while earning money playing a cheeky piano at the Maple Leaf Bar by night. One night, a music-store owner called John Stark walked into the bar and heard Joplin playing a tune. Stark introduced himself and asked Joplin if the melody was his own. They struck a deal, and Stark published it; the tune was called ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. With a bit of money now in his pocket, the serious-minded Joplin set himself up as a teacher in St Louis.

The American public would discover ragtime through a dance craze: the cakewalk. This had been started by black workers on plantations as they imitated and lampooned the formal European dances of the white plantation owners. It was a caricature, but as a spectacle it took on a life of its own. The cakewalk became part of the minstrel show and was in major vogue in the mid-1890s, with raggy compositions like Sadie Green’s ‘Cakewalk’ (1896). Joplin had the idea of writing specifically for the cakewalk and other neo-folk dances, like the two-step and the slow drag. He created The Ragtime Dance, a modern folk ballet, in 1902. Stark initially refused to publish it, fearing it was too ambitious and wouldn’t sell. Wasn’t ragtime meant to be simple good-time music? Wasn’t that why it was popular? After his daughter Nell convinced him to publish the nine sheets of music, Stark’s fears were borne out when The Ragtime Dance flopped. This didn’t stop Joplin from aiming high, his aspirations to serious music revealed by the subtitles of later tunes like ‘Bethena: A Concert Rag’ (1905) and ‘Fig Leaf Rag: A High Class Rag’ (1908).

Minstrelsy would have been a constant presence in Joplin’s life, whereas for us today it is simply an unfortunate pop-cultural flavour which we can choose to ignore. It was the key to the entire framework of American vaudeville culture for many decades, through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a language everyone spoke and shared. It was culturally strong as well as culturally nasty; the minstrel archetypes – stock characters like Zip Coon, the Interlocutor, Tambo and Bones – and topics like razor fights offered a powerful and seductive comedic structure. This culture was a limiting framework within which you could nonetheless flourish as a black performer or writer, despite the self-evident moral morass. Some of the biggest ‘coon song’ hits were by black writers, including the most famous (and to modern ears most repellent), Ernest Hogan’s 1899 hit ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’. This is what Joplin was fighting against when he was trying to get ragtime taken seriously, not only as pop music, but as a cultural representation of black America. His high ideals would cause him huge heartache in the future.

Joplin aside, who else was out there writing this music? In Kansas City there was Charles L. Johnson, who wrote the insanely uplifting ‘Dill Pickles’. It was published by the Carl Hoffman Music Company in Kansas City, Missouri, the same outfit that had published Scott Joplin’s ‘Original Rags’. It was a sheet-music million-seller, the second after ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, and it single-handedly pushed ragtime’s popularity up another level in 1906, just as it was starting to wane.

Then there was James Scott, a song plugger at a music shop in Carthage, Missouri, who wrote rags in his spare time. In 1905 he travelled to St Louis to find his hero, Scott Joplin, and play him one of his tunes. Joplin was impressed. John Stark published the ‘Frog Legs Rag’ in 1906, and it became the best-selling tune in the Stark catalogue, after ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. ‘Everybody called [James Scott] Little Professor,’ remembered Scott’s cousin Patsy. ‘He always walked rapidly looking at the ground, would pass you on the street and never see you, always deep in thought.’

In Baltimore, there was child prodigy Eubie Blake, whose parents had bought him a pump organ when he was just five. By the time he was a teenager he was playing in bordellos, as well as in church, and by 1912, aged twenty-five, he was on the vaudeville circuit playing his own ragtime tunes, such as ‘Charleston Rag’. He also played with James Reese Europe’s feted Society Orchestra, who accompanied the white dancing sensations Vernon and Irene Castle. Blake’s stab at immortality would be achieved with another black vaudeville act, Noble Sissle, and their 1921 all-black Broadway revue Shuffle Along, which included the deathless, post-ragtime ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry’.

Another Joplin fan, Joseph Lamb, was of Irish descent and lived in New Jersey. He shared Joplin’s love of long, classical phrases. Lamb took piano lessons from a priest at school in Ontario, but quit after a few weeks because ‘the good father had nothing to offer Joe’. He took it for granted that ragtime was a respectable pursuit, something his hero Joplin could never do.VI

Joplin’s muse may have been leading him to think of a rag opera, but with the demand for more rags came commercial necessity. Other songwriters were less high-minded, and New York’s new publishing companies were happy to take advantage. You were only a marginally capable piano player, hoping to keep the wife and kids entertained? Write a rag, man! One writer who simplified the Joplin style and considerably sped up the ragtime tempo – a classic pop move – was George Botsford. His ‘Black and White Rag’ would be revived decades later as the manic, joyous theme to the BBC’s snooker show Pot Black.

After John Stark, the most significant – and commercially savvy – publisher of ragtime was Charles Neil Daniels, who managed America’s biggest music publisher, Jerome H. Remick. A pianist, he had been noted at college for his exquisite pen-and-ink manuscripts. In 1901, while managing the sheet-music department of the Barr Dry Goods Company in St Louis, he wrote a song called ‘Hiawatha’. Daniels was offered the unheard-of sum of $10,000 for it by Detroit-based Jerome H. Remick; with this came the offer to manage Remick’s company. He accepted, and words were added to ‘Hiawatha’, creating a tableau of a simple, primitivist West. ‘Hiawatha’ sold millions of copies, kick-starting a craze for Tin Pan Alley-penned ‘Indian’ songs: ‘Feather Queen’, ‘Valley Flower’, ‘Golden Deer’, ‘Red Wing’ (based on a Robert Schumann melody), ‘Silver Heels’ (about ‘the sweetest and the neatest little girl’) and others, all glorious, whitewashed fabrications. Lyrics tended to revolve around ‘heap much kissing’, and the craze lasted right up until the outbreak of World War I. But Daniels wasn’t interested in writing more faux-Native songs, because he was a ragtime fan, pure and simple; he even encouraged his staff to write rags and scoured small towns for locally published work. Remick eventually published five hundred rags, roughly a sixth of all published ragtime songs, and Daniels nurtured ragtime with a fan’s enthusiasm and a businessman’s nous. (He was also smart enough to realise motion pictures were going to make more money than sheet music and wrote a song for Mickey, a Mack Sennett film starring Mabel Normand in 1919. It would become the first-ever film theme.)

Ragtime began its spread across Europe in 1900, when John Philip Sousa introduced it as part of his repertoire on his first overseas tour. Vess Ossman, the banjo player, came over playing rags later the same year. Things moved slowly, and though the ragtime-associated dances like the turkey trot, the bunny hug and the grizzly bear crossed the Atlantic, it wasn’t until 1912 that the Original American Ragtime Octet reached Britain. Without witnessing American musicians playing the music, Europeans had found it hard to grasp its syncopation, but seeing the real deal made all the difference. Also in 1912, a British revue called Hullo Ragtime became the first of many, with more than seventy rag-based revues running in Britain by 1913. Music hall was not allergic to the new music’s charms, and Marie Lloyd’s ‘Piccadilly Trot’ was gently ragtime-influenced, even if it did claim the territory for its own: ‘No doubt you’ve heard about the turkey trot, some say it’s rot, some say it’s not. Well, I’ve got another one that beats the lot, and it doesn’t come from Yankeeland.’ Nevertheless, it was seen by many as a fad and didn’t entirely revolutionise British dance culture, which was still largely based on waltzes. Right up until World War I broke out, dance programmes were still printed with threads and came with tiny pencils. Take a look at one and it might reveal the occasional two-step, but outside of the music halls everything dance-related was still put together with military precision. The dancefloor revolution in Europe would have to wait a while.

What did ragtime recordings sound like in the early scuffling days of the music industry? Those from the first decade of the twentieth century tended to feature either a banjo (accompanied by military band or piano), piccolo, accordion or xylophone – all high, percussive instruments that would cut through the grit and hiss of early 78s. The first ragtime record with solo piano – ‘Everybody Two Step’ by Mike Bernard – was released as late as 1912. Bernard was the orchestra leader at Tony Pastor’s Music Hall in New York; back in 1900, he had won a ragtime piano-playing competition sponsored by the Police Gazette and been rewarded with a diamond-studded medal that proclaimed him ‘Ragtime King of the World’.

Once ragtime became an international craze, it was inevitable that things like subtlety and nuance would get lost in the rush and that writers would start adding lyrics for extra catchiness. Tin Pan Alley simplified ragtime, which may have wrinkled the noses of purists, but ensured its survival as the prime pop trend right up to 1917: hits included ‘Trouble Rag’, ‘Jungle Town Rag’, ‘Chocolate Creams Rag’, ‘Ragtime Insanity’, ‘Mop Rag’ and ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’. The latter was a miracle in that it squeezed together two trends: one for modernist ragtime, and another for melancholic, nostalgic cowboy songs. Mostly, lyrics gabbed on about