1899 Afro newspaper RAGTIME MUSIC + BOOKER T WASHINGTON

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SEE PHOTOS----- COMPLETE, ORIGINAL and exceedingly rare early Black published newspaper, the Indianapolis Weekly Freeman (Indiana) dated July 22, 1899. Inside page long report on the origin of RAGTIME MUSIC, in the Black community . This is the earliest long report I have seen on the origin of ragtime music and its origins in the Negro Community. T is also a prominent front page headline and 2 columns letter signed in type by Negro leader BOOKER T WASHINGTON . T is also a long front page essay on the "Atrocious Crimes of the South (against the Negro race)..." Ragtime (alternately spelled Ragged-time) is an originally American musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged", rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. It was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa , with additional polyrhythms coming from African music. The ragtime composer Scott Joplin became famous through the publication in 1899 of the " Maple Leaf Rag " and a string of ragtime hits that followed, although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s. For at least 12 years after its publication, the "Maple Leaf Rag" heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, harmonic progressions or metric patterns . Ragtime fell out of favor as Jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but t have been numerous revivals since as the music has been re-discovered. First in the early 1940s many jazz bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 RPM records . A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s as a wider variety of ragtime styles of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed, published, and recorded. In 1971 Joshua Rifkin brought out a compilation of Scott Joplin's work which was nominated for a Grammy Award , and in 1973, the motion picture The Sting brought ragtime to a wide audience with its soundtrack of Joplin tunes. Subsequently the film's rendering of Joplin's 1902 rag " The Entertainer " was a top 40 hit in 1974. Ragtime (with Joplin's work in the forefront) has been cited as an American equivalent of minuets by Mozart , mazurkas by Chopin or Waltzes by Brahms . Ragtime influenced Classical composers including Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky . Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, orator, author and the dominant leader of the nation's African-American community from the 1890s to his death. Born to slavery and freed by the Civil War in 1865, he led the new Tuskegee Institute, then a teachers' college for blacks. It was to become his base of operations. The " Atlanta Exposition " speech of 1895 appealed to middle class whites across the South, asking them to give blacks a chance to work and develop separately, while implicitly promising not to demand the vote. White leaders across the North, from politicians to industrialists, from philanthropists to churchmen, enthusiastically supported Washington, as did most middle class blacks. Meanwhile a more militant northern group, led by W. E. B. Du Bois rejected Washington's self-help philosophy and demanded recourse to politics, referring to the speech dismissively as "The Atlanta Compromise". The critics were marginalized until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, at which point more radical black leaders rejected Washington's philosophy and demanded federal civil rights laws. The Indianapolis Freeman was the VERY FIRST National Black illustrated newspaper ( see below ) and its motto (in the masthead) reads: "A National Colored Weekly Newspaper." It is similar in appearance to the NY Daily Graphic but concentrates on news a... read more

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