Features and Reviews
Farewell to the Ragtime Patriarch;
An Interview with Rudi Blesh
Part II
By Galen Wilkes
Here is the conclusion to the interview I did with Rudi Blesh on February 20, 1978 in New York City. We, of course, center mainly on They All Played Ragtime, and Rudi gives his ideas on ragtime performance. At the time, I was not aware of any other recorded interviews with Rudi about his ragtime work, although I know of a couple that happened later on. (John Hasse's interview appears in his book, Ragtime: Its History, Composers and Music.) Looking back, I am sorry I did not delve a little deeper into other things with Rudi, but my standpoint on all of it then was different from what it is now. One of the things I learned while doing this was never to hold anyone to something they said or wrote some years ago. People change and so do their ideas. Print does not. This is also one reason why there needs to be constant research. Material needs to be updated, gaps need to be filled, corrections made, and new findings brought to light. Rudi discusses some of his viewpoints here. This was a great privilege and thrill for me and I am glad to present this interview.
Rudi Blesh in 1975 in New York
GW: You have called Joplin, Scott, and Lamb, in that order, the big three of ragtime. Have you changed your ideas about this at all or have you added to it?
RB: I don't think so, but I think it's being constantly added to now that the repertory of ragtime is very wide. But they are outstanding in the individuality of their concepts and how well they realized them, and the body of works they each left. And when you're ranking those things you can't say, like for example, "Pickles and Peppers" which you mentioned a while ago...that's a wonderful rag but what else did she write? I suppose something, but where is it? It's almost an arbitrary thing. We did an awful lot of mulling over the thing and it seemed to us that quite clearly Scott Joplin was the leader and the man who really formulated the ragtime form and all those things, and he deserved the accolade as leader. Between Scott and Lamb we just couldn't decide. Then what do you do with men like Arthur Marshall—some of his rags are beautiful—or "Heliotrope" by Chauvin? It was awfully hard putting in all the names we felt should be in, and not make it just a catalog of names, really! When I look at the book and see how many people are mentioned I thought, well, it sort of sounded like you were reading the telephone directory! We practically interviewed over 50 people...and five years after the book came out, half of them were already dead.
Galen Wilkes and Rudi Blesh in Sedalia, MO in 1983. Galen is holding a first-edition printing of "They All Played Ragtime" which Blesh autographed to him.
It was an adventure story. It was the most fun I had in my life; constantly discovering things. We just assumed Joe Lamb was dead. Because we figured he was a contemporary of Joplin's. Finding him was an indescribable experience. He apologized so much for his playing but you know not all piano composers have been great players. He quite frankly said, "I write rags which are too hard for me to play," and he said, "I write them the way I want them to be." And of course at that time, which was 1949 I guess, he had that piano bench of his...which was full of manuscripts, we couldn't get him to play...but there was all that beautiful stuff he was working on.
GW: But at least it was there on paper.
RB: It was there on paper!
GW: And you've done so much to have that stuff recorded and promoted that I think we really owe a lot to you.
RB: If the music hadn't been there I couldn't have done it.
GW: If you hadn't pursued it we wouldn't have known it was there.
RB: It became obsessive, it really did.
GW: What was the reason for not including much on novelty ragtime in your book?
RB: Well, in the first place, we had formed a concept of what we call "Classic Ragtime" which pretty much parallels what John Stark meant when he used the term. To us, at that point, we had been through so much of this beautiful classical material that, frankly, to us at that point, novelty ragtime seemed like a kind of joke on the whole thing. A step down. What we didn't realize, of course, was that it couldn't have gone much farther after the big three had their hands in it. Except—no, I take that back. Look what Joe Lamb did all those years. But anyway, I think we under-judged a bit, and have been a bit castigated for it, but anyway we just couldn't have covered it. Imagine the size of that book if we put in the whole novelty period. And I don't know why somebody else doesn't go to work and do it—instead of crabbing because we didn't!
GW: How was your book first received when it was published?
RB: Quietly. It was sort of a time bomb. It got good reviews. I remember Alan Lomax, whose work I respect very much, got a copy of it just before he sailed for Europe and left a review for the Herald Tribune. He said it's the finest job of research in American music for many a decade. He said if anything would start the revival of ragtime, this will do it. Well, it might have helped start it, but it took a long time. And along those lines, when Hansi Janis read the reviews, she said, "I wish it weren't so, but I'm gonna tell you something—it will take, in my opinion, 25 years."
Now, 25 years later takes us right into the early 1970s, almost the same year "The Sting" became a big hit. She was so right about that! In the first place, the people who'd known it in their youth tended to be older people and didn't have much influence on the forming of musical taste. It took the younger people just a while to find it out, and when they heard it they loved it! I'll tell you what I decided. The basic requirement of any music is, number one: it needs to be heard. You can write about it—but what does it mean? You write about Beethoven, but it's not like hearing one of his symphonies. It simply has to be played. And there's something about jazz that made ragtime suddenly seem awfully old hat. It just did. Ragtime, I believe, is rather reflective and a mood sort of thing, and it's essentially gentle, most of it. Jazz was a very virile, aggressive music. Am I right? I don't mean to play it down. I think the blues and jazz are wonderful, but they're different.GW: Ragtime was considered a young man's music at the turn of the century. Do you think it is still a young man's music today?
RB: I think it essentially is. I think its outlook is one of youthfulness. It's one of having faith in things and not being cynical; having an ability to feel sentiment. And notice I don't say "sentimentality," but "sentiment," which is characteristic of the young. Yes, I do think so. I think an awful lot of good music is. After all, the Viennese waltzes were the music of young people in the 1850s, they were! They were all young people waltzing to these, you know.
GW: How are your feelings about playing ragtime? Do you believe in staying to the written score, or improvising?
Slightly worn 1972 cover of Milton Kaye's "Ragtime at the Rosebud." The familiar photos of ragtime greats are all from Blesh's archives.
RB: What I like to see done is what Milton Kaye did on the albums we made of "Ragtime at the Rosebud" and so forth. An approach, no matter what about Joplin, would be to treat it as a theme and variations. In other words, the first time the theme is played, play it absolutely the way the composer had written it, then introduce your own variations and stuff in the repeat. And it does make a certain kind of musical sense. Because in the first place, the repeats sometimes get just a little boring hearing it note for note. And this theory—and I think he's probably right—is that it's about the same thing Joplin probably did. But Joplin said play it exactly as written because there were too many hands chopping up his stuff! And there were these girls—and this is not a chauvinistic remark—but the girls were always the music demonstrators and ragtime was sold in the ten-cent stores. Most of them couldn't play worth a darn. They could get the melody, you know. Then you'd buy it and take it home.
GW: Well, we're just about out of time. Is there anything you'd like to add?
RB: No, I don't think so...just "long live ragtime!"
GW: I'll agree with that.
RB: OK, good!
Copyright ©1978 Galen Wilkes. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission and with the assistance of the author.
