The 1910’s: Music Through the Ages

“Scott Joplin” Photo Credits: The Library of Congress

By Alekhya Maram and Anna Ravid

The 1910’s marked the beginning of a new era of American music. The advent of joyful ragtime amongst African Americans in the Deep South starkly contrasted with the realities of wartime America. Ragtime, a precursor to jazz, quickly flourished, and this new style of playing enthralled audiences, especially the bright piano playing of Scott Joplin.

Joplin, born to a formerly enslaved father and a freeborn mother, is credited with popularizing and influencing ragtime. His most famous piece, “Maple Leaf Rag,” is still widely known today— if not by name, then certainly by ear. While there are no recordings of Joplin, his music was preserved through piano rolls, a preservation method by which each note played is perforated on a roll of paper. This roll can be fed into a self playing piano in order to mirror the live performance of a famous artist.  

According to Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, “Joplin's death is widely considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format; over the next several years, it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz, and eventually big band swing.” 

Photo Credit: The Library of Congress

While the springy tenor of ragtime makes for easy listening, it lacks in complexity when compared to blues and jazz. The songs are often so whimsical they border on childish, and after listening to a few, it becomes hard to distinguish one from the rest. 

Around the same time ragtime was developing, blues were born out of the plantations in the Mississippi Delta region. Originally, blues music was improvised, and lyrics usually pertained to feelings of melancholy and sadness. Guitar players often used a bottleneck slide instead of strumming, creating a sad voice-like effect that exemplified blues guitar. One notable artist who emerged during the 1910s was W.C Handy, known as the “Father of Blues.” Born to a family of methodist ministers, Handy was prohibited by his father from playing any instrument other than the organ. Thankfully, Handy did not comply. At the start of the decade, Handy moved to Memphis and began his career as a musician, performing frequently at the Beale Street Clubs.  His most famous compositions, “Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues,” were inspired by his experiences in the titular cities. 

As opposed to ragtime, which was primarily played on the piano, the blues music of the 1910s included brass instruments. Surprisingly, W.C. Handy’s blues music bore more similarities to the buoyant melodies of jazz and ragtime than the melancholy tones usually associated with blues. Those dolorous tones, along with lyrics describing the many woes in life, would reemerge in later decades, bringing blues music back to its roots. Though Handy’s blues compositions represented significant achievements in the genre, his songs don’t capture the deep soulfulness that makes the style so distinctive. 

In 1917, the year of Scott Joplin’s death, ragtime exited the musical mainstream, giving way to jazz. Though jazz and ragtime music originated in black communities, the first jazz and ragtime recordings featured white artists, as black musicians were often barred from entering the recording industry. The very first jazz record produced contained the song “Livery Stable Blues,” performed by the all-white Dixieland Jazz Band. 

The production of this record marked the entrance of jazz into mainstream society, a force that would both shape and reflect the coming decade: the Roaring Twenties.