An Introduction to America’s Music

242 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I

value of education, her emphasis on self-reliance fully in sympathy with the teach-

ings of Booker T. Washington. Joplin called his work a grand opera. “I am a com-

poser of ragtime music,” he explained, “but I want it thoroughly understood that

my opera ‘Treemonisha’ is not ragtime.” Joplin announced plans for a 1913 per-

formance by forty singers and an orchestra of twenty-fi ve, but it never happened.

Joplin used to tell friends and rivals that he would be dead for twenty-fi ve

years before people appreciated his accomplishments. His prediction proved

wrong by half, for more than fi fty years passed before a ragtime revival took place

in the 1970s with Joplin as its central fi gure. New recordings of his music were

made; his rags were republished; Tre e m o n i s h a was performed and recorded; rag-

time orchestras were formed; and an Academy Award–winning fi lm, The Sting,

was released in 1973 with a score made up of Joplin’s compositions. Although

Joplin in his own lifetime never won the respect he sought for himself outside

the popular sphere, his music has now earned its own kind of classic status.

POPULAR SONG AND DANCE

IN THE RAGTIME ERA

Even before the fi rst published instrumental rags, ragtime syncopations began to

creep into the vocabulary of popular song. In part, this was the result of the open-

ing up of minstrelsy and its descendants, vaudeville and musical comedy, to black

entertainers. But the minstrel tradition put these young performers and song writ-

ers in a bind. Its character types were too rigid to accommodate their talents, yet too

widely accepted for black entertainers to ignore. Moreover, African Americans

had to contend with a new kind of black character appearing in popular song dur-

ing the 1880s: the “coon,” a shiftless black male who could also be dangerous. The

lyrics of so-called coon songs—to use the label then applied to songs with lyrics in

stage Negro dialect—feature references to watermelon, chicken (usually stolen),

alcohol, gambling, and other demeaning stereotypes of African American life.

Having caught on with white audiences, coon songs were part of the legacy that

younger black artists inherited when they entered show business.

Any African American who worked in show business was faced with the confl ict

between needing to please an audience and knowing that many standard crowd-

pleasing devices openly ridiculed black people’s capacities and character. Enter-

tainers dealt differently with the confl ict. According to one Tin Pan Alley publisher,

Edward Marks, leading fi gures like Bert Williams and George Walker were “out-

wardly resigned to all sorts of discrimination. They would sing ‘coon,’ they would

joke about ‘niggers,’ they accepted their success with wide-mouthed grins as the

gift of the gods.” But the brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson were

different: “emphatically new Negro,” as Marks saw it, and eager to change the car-

icature. “Their father was a minister—and they combined a clerical dignity, uni-

versity culture, and an enormous amount of talent.” The Johnson brothers “wrote

songs sometimes romantic, sometimes whimsical, but they eschewed the squalor

and the squabbles, the razors, wenches, and chickens.... The word ‘coon’ they

banished from their rhyming dictionary, despite its tempting affi nity with moon.”

The new generation of entertainers also inherited the cakewalk. Rooted in

African tradition, this new way of moving onstage originated in a contest held

during slavery times in which couples competed to show the fanciest strutting,

“coon songs”

the cakewalk

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