CHAPTER 10 | POPULAR SONG AND DANCE IN THE RAGTIME ERA 247
military band, backs up the singer with an arrangement that sticks close to the
piano part in the published sheet music. The singer, Billy Murray, was a success-
ful recording artist who seldom performed onstage. Rather, his appeal lay in his
ability to enunciate words clearly and “hammer” his voice (as he put it) into the
acoustic recording horn that was used in the years before the invention of the
electric microphone in 1925. In short, his voice and technique were ideally suited
to overcoming the limitations of early recording technology.
All the sections familiar from nineteenth-century popular songs—introduc-
tion, verse, and chorus—are present in “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The only
new element is the vamp, a two-bar phrase that can be repeated an indefi nite
number of times until the singer begins the verse. The vamp comes from stage
performance, where a singer might be telling a joke or fi nishing up some other
stage business before launching into the song. For that reason, vamps in sheet
music often carry the indication “till ready.” Although not necessary in nonstage
performances, the vamp became an expected part of popular song form and can
be heard in this and countless other recordings of the era.
Another feature of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was becoming a standard
part of popular song structure in the second decade of the twentieth century:
the thirty-two-bar chorus, divided into four equal sections of eight bars each.
The abac pattern found here was becoming more common and would continue
to be a standard pattern in later decades.
“That Mysterious Rag,” written a few months after “Alexander,” confi rms
the impact of ragtime but treats it as a kind of music that is more to be feared
than relished. The text tells of a melody so disturbingly unforgettable that
even sleepers are not immune: “If you ever wake up from your dreaming, /
A- scheming, eyes gleaming, / Then if suddenly you take a screaming fi t, /
That’s it!” Once planted in the brain, the music takes over, as if the victim were
bewitched.
Although “Everybody’s Doing It Now” contains relatively little syncopation,
this song also emphasizes rhythm. The title, a daring double entendre for its day,
refers to ragtime dancing. The verse notes the music’s energizing effect: “Ain’t
the funny strain / Goin’ to your brain? / Like a bottle of wine / Fine.” And the
chorus tells us that this electric new musical style—“Hear that trombone bustin’
apart?”—was driving dancers to throw restraint to the winds:See that ragtime couple over there,
Watch them throw their shoulders in the air,
Snap their fi ngers, honey, I declare,
It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a bear,
There!While “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was the last of Berlin’s ragtime songs to
suggest that the new music was solely for African Americans, “That Mysterious
Rag” and “Everybody’s Doing It Now,” by containing no evident ethnic markers
of any kind, celebrate white America’s infatuation with ragtime. But both songs
also capture the frisson of danger: ragtime melodies are like drugs or diseases that
can lead to mental derangement, and ragtime dances incite animalistic behavior
that may stir illicit passions. Fears about the dangerous effects of ragtime music
and dance often carried racist undertones, as in the assertion of Dr. Marion
Palmer Hunt in 1897 that the best dancers were to be found among “untutoredvamp“That Mysterious Rag”“Everybody’s Doing It
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