How Illinois Launched a Worldwide Ragtime Craze
Originally published in No Depression, December 2021.
Image via Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
As previously discussed in this column, much of what we consider to be “roots music” these days stemmed directly from the Black experience in America. Spirituals and gospel have their origins in the field churches of enslaved Black Americans. The blues were born in the financial despair of Reconstruction. Old-time and bluegrass wouldn’t exist without the banjo, an all-American instrument descended from similar folk instruments seen in dozens of West African cultures. I could go on and on (and arguably I do by having this column in the first place).
Ragtime, a jaunty and danceable progenitor of jazz, fits right into this same narrative. And while stylistically it is rooted in the sounds of the South, ragtime got its start — and began its rise to worldwide cultural domination — at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.