15 posts tagged “ragtime”
A strangely titled piece from a wonderful, if uneven, band called the Leake County Revelers. Fairly popular in their day, this white group was even hired by the Kingfish, Huey Long, to play at stops on the campaign trail.
Here's all you need to know about the Dallas String Band, a superlative group with a distinctive mandolin sound. No, I do not own the above 78. I, uh, found the jpeg, um, on the sidewalk.
The first part of the beginning exchange goes like this.
Unknown guy: Say, Coley, can you sing?
Coley Jones (mandolinist): No!
Unknown guy: Why?
Coley Jones: I lost my voice in jail. I'm always behind a few bars, and can never find a key.
Har!
Ernesto Nazareth was a Brazilian composer of tangos and other musical forms, employing sounds from diverse sources like jazz and ragtime. He died in 1934. Played by Josh Rifkin.
Mr. Lamb's beautiful little ditty, played on six string.
A duet by Lasse Johansson and Claes Palmqvist.
This is Gid Tanner. He was an early country great. He had a big hat with "GID" written on it. Boo-yah.
Sylvester "Vess" Ossman plays, yes, a bunch of rags for you.
Come listen to the sad tale of Louis Chauvin, the ragtime prodigy who died at too young an age and left too little behind for us to remember him by. Chauvin was widely considered the best ragtime pianist of his time, winning numerous "cutting" contests and performing a sizable repertoire of tunes. Unlike Joplin, who strove to record as well as play his music, Chauvin—who could neither read nor write music—was content with the sporting life offered by the whorehouses and gambling dens of St. Louis. He died at the excessively young age of 27, perishing from complications brought on by MS and syphilis.
Due to Chauvin's musical illiteracy and the utter absence of any cylinder recordings made by him (if there ever were any), we're allowed only a glimpse of his genius. Only three works of his have been handed down to us: two songs and a single rag, the lovely "Heliotrope Bouquet." Joplin helped Chauvin transcribe the tune, but it is known that Chauvin provided only the first two parts of the rag, while Joplin wrote the second two. A shame, since Chauvin's compositional ability likely ranked with that of the big three of ragtime: Joplin, Joseph Lamb, and James Scott.
I present two version here. A guitar duet by Lasse Johansson and Claes Palmqvist and a piano version by Chicago's own ragtime prodigy Reginald R. Robinson.
