The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century
created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers.
However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest
hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. “Coon
songs,” with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and
played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and
jazz.
In Ragged but Right, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and
itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the “big
shows,” the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker,
Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set,
Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from “coon shouters”
to “blues singers.”
Throughout the ragtime era and into the era
of blues and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular
demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated
black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their
nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such
as the Rabbit's Foot and Silas Green from New Orleans provided blues and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.
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