The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace

Abstract

In the past decade ragtime has experienced a rebirth. Recent studies of early twentieth-century modernity have appropriately reoriented their attention to the age of ragtime, drawing attention to the musical form's cultural confluences. Reevaluating ragtime's cultural importance in the new American century calls attention to African American citizenship in the discourse about what, and who, produced distinctively American culture. The extent to which African American musical culture was reviled or celebrated by American national discourses of culture, profession, and policy indicates relative dispositions toward African American citizenship and acceptance. Ragtime's inclusion in modern America's composition was recognized mostly by its African American composers. Debating in the New York Times with the writer and former black bohemian lyrical composer James Weldon Johnson, the noted music critic Henry Krehbiel called ragtime “a degraded form of music” with brothel beginnings. The ragtime cultural debates emblematized these polemic attitudes about African American citizenship. White musicians guilds in this period “professionalized” their organizations by limiting the types of music they performed. Working from lower and midtown Manhattan, African American composers such as Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, Will Cook, Bob Cole, and Theodore Drury responded by presenting professionally oriented African American musicians, compositions, and organizations. At the center of efforts to protect and disseminate African American musical forms was the innovative composer, band leader, and organizer of a prototypical union and contracting agency for black musicians James Reese Europe.