CHAPTER 10 | POPULAR SONG AND DANCE IN THE RAGTIME ERA 249
savages, the illiterate negroes and
the patients in our lunatic asy-
lums.” From a black perspective,
James Weldon Johnson wrote of his
amusement in seeing white danc-
ers trying to emulate what they saw
as the “primitive” abandon of Afri-
can Americans. Ragtime thus took
its place as the fi rst in a long line of
popular music innovations in the
United States that, in the eyes of
their detractors, marked the end of
civilization.JAMES REESE EUROPE AND
THE CASTLESAt the same time Irving Berlin was offering ragtime as an emblem of current
fashion, a black musician working in New York was reminding the public of the
music’s African American roots. Born in 1881 in Mobile, Alabama, and raised in
Washington, D.C., James Reese Europe played piano and violin but hoped most
of all to be a conductor. Around 1903 he moved to New York and was soon con-
ducting shows there. In 1910 Europe joined with others to create the Clef Club, a
booking agency for African American musicians: the fi rst real effort to harness
the city’s black musical talent. The club’s roster of players in its peak
years numbered more than two hundred, ready to form a dance
orchestra at a moment’s notice.
Europe’s protégé, bandleader and singer Noble Sissle,
remembered that before his mentor came into promi-
nence, the New York social elite had favored Viennese
waltzes, rendered by gypsy bands playing stringed
instruments. But after members of white society
heard Europe’s syncopated music, they began
hiring bands formed by members of the Clef
Club. Europe and his men were hired because
they were the best performers of the music their
rich customers wanted to hear. “The wealthy
people,” Sissle explained, “would not take a
substitute when they could buy the original.”
While providing dance music for high-society
entertainments, Europe became acquainted in
1913 with the white husband-and-wife profes-
sional dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle.
Shortly after their marriage in 1911 the Castles had
created a sensation in Paris by introducing the new
ragtime dances. Two years later they were back in New
York City, demonstrating a new style of dancing they had
begun to develop by combining African American dance
steps with European and Latin American dances such as theK James Reese Europe
(1881–1919) poses as
conductor with members of
New York City’s Clef Club
(1914).James Weldon Johnson on Ragtime Dancers
O
n occasions, I have been amazed and amused watching
white people dancing to a Negro band in a Harlem cabaret;
attempting to throw off the crusts and layers of inhibitions laid on by
sophisticated civilization; striving to yield to the feel and experience
of abandon; seeking to recapture a taste of the primitive joy in life
and living; trying to work their way back into that jungle which was
the original Garden of Eden; in a word, doing their best to pass for
colored.In their own words
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