Who here has heard of ragtime? Okay, actually I’m not speaking of the fabulous, strident syncopated piano genre created by Scott Joplin, Will Marion Cook, and others — as in “Maple Leaf Rag,” “The Entertainer,” “Easy Winners,” and the lot.
No, I’m thinking of the heavily layered narrative ragtime that hit the big-time for obsessively studious author E. L. Doctorow. He, as do I, loved that whoop-da-doo, star-spangled-era circa 1908, when colonialism was not yet a dirty word; and derbied, starch collared gents tipped their hats to demure ladies decked with bustles and ostrich feathers, to the background clip-clop of draft horses or the rumble of a brand new hupmobile!
The most scandalous snippet of the Doctorow story is a moment where a cocoa-colored infant is uncovered — alive — in the vegetable garden of “Father” whose grand verandahed/ awning family seat stands in a prosperous New Jersey town…
Very similar to Hoboken, where my maternal grandfather Lecnidas dwelt under his father’s roof. Great-grandfather was a major general in the Union Army, and my dear mom insisted — to me, anyway — that she was that forbidden spawn of the chief house servant’s youngest girl, that is.
That wasn’t my only link to Ragtime. No, not by a long shot. Though my mom’s fantastical fabrication was a balm to a kid who had never felt at ease with growing up as pure white Caucasian stock. In 1962, I enjoyed candy-stripe sleeved pianist Max Morath’s half-hour TV show “The Ragtime Era” nearly every week. (You had to know there’d be a piano in the picture where I was concerned).
Morath pounded those ‘88s at breakneck speed, but gosh, there wasn’t hardly any turn-of-the-century ditty he couldn’t churn out. Little did I know that around 1971 my irrepressible mother Big Ruth — between shows by Lena Horne and Duke Ellington, both ‘chums’ of hers from her youth in Manhattan – managed to smuggle me backstage at Ford’s in D.C. (where Lincoln met his demise) to pump Mr. Morath’s hand and quiz him on what key “The Entertainer” was written in — Morath: “Didn’t you know it was in C?”
Two years earlier, in the dead of a frigid December, when Washington still had the capability for ice-bound nights, I squatted in torn jeans beside Willie the Lion Smith, a master of strife and ragtime, and shook his velvety smooth palm, burnished from 60 years of steady ivoried mastery. It was Blues Alley in Georgetown — at the time too snooty to admit a long-haired runaway kid in jeans, who couldn’t afford the cover or pass the 1969 dress code for snooty jazz clubs. Who knew my own signature band three decades on would be gracing their august stage — Blues Museum? (Not to mention my taking a spotlight on their grand piano for Avery Parrish after hours? [What? No Willie the Lion?])
