Word: joplin
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Ronstadt has few equals at blue-eyed soul; she has a more melodic voice than Joplin and a richer, stronger one than Bonnie Raitt, and she is as gritty and vital as ever. As in her last album, her efforts at it are limited to two, but both are up to her best. She screams and stomps her way through the old Martha and the Vandellas standard "Heat Wave," unleashing a wanton vitality that comes close to out-muscling the original version--no easy achievement. The same approach characterizes her earthy rendition of "Roll um Easy...
After his mother's death, and one argument too many with his father about learning a trade, the boy left home for good at age 14 to become a honky-tonk pianist. It was the only trade he cared about. No doubt Joplin could play "ragged time," as it was first called because of its bouncing bass and syncopated right hand, as bumptiously as the next man. But by the time he began writing his rags down in the late 1890s, they had obviously become objects of care, even personal meaning...
Schuller in his book Early Jazz, the first volume of his The History of Jazz, makes a convincing case for the European march as a source of the rag. A typical Joplin rag has a disciplined arrangement of repeats and returns not unlike that of the march, and a similar duple tune signature. Jazz probably got its start, Schuller believes, when saloon pianists who could not read music began improvising rags they had heard...
...1920s ragtime was forgotten. So was the softspoken, thoughtful Joplin, a friendly man who had always been willing to listen to other musicians. He was apparently something of a wandering lover, as the dedications of The Sycamore to Minnie L. Montgomery and Leola to Miss Minnie Wade suggest. But he craved the comfort and security of marriage. His first failed: the former Belle Hayden had no interest in his music, and their baby daughter died in infancy. His second marriage, to Lottie Stokes, seemed perfect, and Lottie stood by him as he exhausted himself and his money trying...
Clear Chords. The current Joplin vogue is now five years old. it began when a record company, Nonesuch, began issuing Joplin albums played by such "straight" pianists as Joshua Rifkin and William Bolcom. It gained distinction in 1972 when Vera Brodsky Lawrence, an ex-concert pianist, brought out a two-volume edition of Joplin's printed music. The film The Sting made Joplin's The Entertainer a national hit. This year came the bestselling novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (TIME, July 14); a central figure is the black ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. As Walker sits down...