Ragtime

This isn't your grandparents' dance music — it's your great-grandparents' dance music. Starting at the tail-end of the 19th century, ragtime brought sex and swing into the American piano parlor. Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" is the style's national anthem, full of joy and strut-your-stuff syncopation. "The Entertainer," another Joplin tune, was the theme from Robert Redford/Paul Newman cinematic smash The Sting, and an anachronistic '70s pop chart-topper. Jelly Roll Morton arranged "Black Bottom Stomp" for a full band, proving that there was life for ragtime beyond the piano, and giving a glimpse of things to come.

In Next Steps you'll find out how ragtime led to the creation of jazz.

Ragtime ruled the piano rolls at the turn of the 20th century (jukeboxes and radio were barely born), but sharp ears could hear it slowly mutate into something called jazz. Locomotive rags like "Swipesy Cake Walk" were what put your backfield in motion back then, but soon future "stride" pioneer Willie "The Lion" Smith started putting some funk in between the lines on tunes like "Junk Man Rag." Before you could say, "'Nawlins," the Crescent City's Original Dixieland Jazz Band (the first jazz group ever recorded) was strutting through the ragtime syncopations of "Palesteena" with horns blazing.

How and where did the spirit of ragtime survive down the decades? Find out in Deep Cuts.

Ragtime's heyday ended in the early 1920s when Dixieland jazz became the order of the day, but that primeval ragtime swing was permanently stuck in America's ear, with revivals cropping up every few decades. Dick Hyman is best known for scoring Woody Allen movies, but "A Barrel of Keysy" makes it clear that he's a man in a ragtime state of mind. Country-folk guitar god Doc Watson's 1966 take on James Scott's "Victory Rag" shows that piano-pounders don't have a monopoly on ragtime. Even jazz-age popular standards like Fats Waller's sly-boots pledge of devotion "Ain't Misbehavin'" have ragtime in their blood, with those rippling rag piano rhythms ringing out as unmistakable as fingerprints.

Ready to hear some sonic history in the making? Ragtime was one of the first mass-produced forms of pop music to take America by storm. Since music sleuths say that the name came from the description of its purposely uneven rhythms as "ragged time," you could even call it the rock 'n' roll of the Gilded Age. Here's where you can experience the full spectrum of roof-raising ragtime, from its first full bloom in Scott Joplin's piano rags, up through its flirtations with kissin' cousins, like stride and Dixieland, all the way to the ragtime revivals and reinventions of today. Saloon-shaking ivory pounders, six-string-wielding country blues fingerpickers, swing-stompin' New Orleans early-jazzers with horns aloft — it's all ragtime, all the time, and you can find it all right here.