|
Eubie Blake
Ragtime music, with its syncopated,
polyrhythmic style, was born, according to
cultural historian Robert Snyder, in the 1890s
in the black saloons and brothels of southern
and midwestern cities like Baltimore and St.
Louis. But it also owed a great deal to march
music, especially the sort of quasi-military
march music most famously associated with John
Philip Sousa. It was at the center of American
popular music from the end of the nineteenth
century until the 1920s. His
character was in the Scott Joplin film and he
was a great follower of Scott Joplin's music.
Ragtime, for most Americans, meant a tinkling
piano; and no one played the ragtime piano any
better or longer than Eubie Blake. Blake, a
musician, composer, and performer born in
Baltimore in 1883, published his first rags in
1914. He met his lifelong friend and
collaborator, Noble Sissle, the following year.
The team of Blake and Sissle went on to write
and perform such notable musical hits as "I'm
Just Wild About Harry" and such successful
Broadway shows as "Shuffle Along."
In this selection from an interview/
performance conducted in 1970 for public
television by musician Max Morath, Blake,
recalls that he had to practice his rags on the
family piano when his mother wasn't home. When
she caught him playing a ragtime tune, she
usually ordered him out the door with the stern
warning: "Take that ragtime out of my house!"
Despite its origins in black urban culture,
ragtime found an enormous audience among white
Americans after the turn of the century, just as
blues, rhythm and blues, soul, and rap music
have done over the course of the twentieth
century.
A transcript of this interview is included
below.
Eubie Blake: So one day I was playing my
mother'd gone out to work, see and what she
was doing home that time in the morning, I don't
know. She came in, says and heard me playing:
"Take that ragtime out of my house!" That's the
first time I ever heard the word "ragtime." And
she made me; she made me stop.
Max Morath: She really made you stop.
Blake: Yes, wouldn't let me play.
Morath: Well, why did she . . . ? I mean why
did she think it was . . .?
Blake: Because ragtime was supposed . . . See
it was out of the houses of ill repute, or
bordellos, I guess that's a better word, and it
was low, low, low. It was considered low music,
see. It wasn't, it wasn't art, see.
Morath: You think it was simply because it
was played in this sporting district . . .
Blake: In the sporting district . . .
Morath: Or because they thought there was
something wrong with the music itself?
Blake: No, not the music, because from whence
it came. See?
Morath: Were you . . . when you were a
teenager or in your early professional days,
were you in that . . .ah, kind of work. I mean
were you close enough to that that you could
tell us about it?
Blake: Yeah. Now you see when I first start
to play in these houses, see, it must have been
around nineteen hundred.
Morath: So you were about fifteen . . .
sixteen.
Blake: Yeah. I used to have to go across to
the pool room. A guy named Rab Walker, he ran
the pool room. And I got a pair of long pants to
put on, you see, because I can't go in this
house with short pants on, see. The pants come
way up here, Max, way up here and roll up, and I
go and play. The woman paid me three dollars a
week. But she never paid me nothing because I
made tips. Boy, sometimes I'd make seven and
eight, ten dollars, see? I've been lucky all my
life: I've always made good money. So, I'd take
the guys to the theater, to the burlesque
theater. They'd go up in the gallery, you know.
Ten cents. If I'd take fifteen guys I'd spend .
. . I had Max this is true I had money all
under the carpet.
So the lady next door, Harp's mother. When they
heard that I was playing, then my mother said,
this woman . . . "I heard somebody play just
like little Eubie," see. "Little Eubie." She
says, "Where?" Says "Up in Aggie Shelton's."
Well, she don't know who Aggie Shelton is. She
says, "What time?" "Oh, it must have been about
twelve o'clock." And I'd steal out at night.
Morath: You'd sneak out of the house at
night.
Blake: Sneak out of the house and go get my
long pants and put'em on, see. Then I'd come
back and put'em back, see. Twenty-five cents I
had to pay him. And my mother says, "Oh, it
couldn't have been him, that boy went to bed at
nine o'clock." I did go to bed, see, but my
mother was at the front and I'd go out the
alley. Go right out the alley and go across the
street, get my long pants, put'em on, go up to
Aggie Shelton's to work. Well, I worked up there
for about three or four months. Then I went down
on what they call the line: sporting houses on
this side, sporting houses on that side, see.
That was Annie Gilly's and I played down there.
That's where the man come and got me to play for
the . . .
Morath: Medicine Show?
Blake: Medicine Show! See.
Morath: Can you remember when you were
playing piano at Aggie Shelton's, for instance?
I mean can you remember the style that you were
playing then?
Blake: I played . . . I have never changed my
style of playing in my life, see.
Morath: Oh now, come on, because you've
studied music ever since 1900.
Blake: All right but, but when I play ragtime
I have never changed my style. You know people
say, "Today, you
take . . ." The pianist today . . . you say,
who's that playing? You can't tell because they
all play alike. Whoever makes a big hit, then
the guy follows that guy, see.
Morath: Mmhmm.
Blake: I'll play like him, see? So they have
no style, very few have a style of their own.
Now I've been playing . . . look. Look now, the
"Charleston Rag," you take the "Charleston Rag."
[Plays]
Blake: Ladies and Gentlemen, that's Ragtime!
Courtesy of Max Morath and the Michigan State
University Voice Library. |
