MATURE CONTENT WARNING!
NOT APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN OR YOUTH
Dear Reader,
This essay discusses mature topics and themes in a frank manner, and contains adult material related to the history of ragtime music, rap and hip hop music, and includes lyrics, observations, and storytelling not intended for young audiences. (No pictures.)
Written in 2006, lightly edited in 2020.
Sincerely,
Dennis Frayne
Lake Forest, CA, USA
Ragtime, Rap, and Raunch
by
Dennis Frayne
(Copyright © 2006-2020)
She’s giggling gleefully, and she’s headed straight for me. From across the room, I look into her excited eyes, and then gaze down toward her bulging breasts, pulled tight in her royal blue silk gown, popping out a bit and bobbing like loosely-filled water balloons. In my blue jeans, t-shirt and leather jacket, I’m the one out of place today. Here at the twentieth annual Ragtime Festival in Sacramento, California, it’s a Rocky Horror audience participation performance from the turn of the previous century. The woman, her garnet-colored peacock feathers and antique Duchesse lace breezing gently to and fro, reaches me, and grinning ear to ear, leans awkwardly close and whispers “We must all look absolutely crazy to you!” I smile, and tell her no, I think she looks fantastic, and I mean it. She welcomes me to the festival, obviously my first one.
Ragtime music in the popular mind conjures up images of old-timers and ‘the good old days’ of a naive, prudish, Victorian age. This room full of idyllic romantics brings those images to life. The smiles are contagious even as the lights dim and we settle into our metal folding chairs, and the morning recital begins. As I listen to Brian Holland play Scott Joplin’s New Rag on the beautiful, jet-black nine-foot Steinway concert grand, I notice the lady beaming next to me breathes with the aid of small tubes and a portable oxygen tank. All around the attendees appear mostly sixty-five and older; some may have sprung well into their eighties. Many of the older gentlemen grip walking canes, and while sitting in reverie, tap them gently between their feet to the beat of the syncopated music. Some of these participants were popular performers in their day.
Now I’m tapping my toes, and smiling, too. What a precious time that must have been, those gay nineties, on the eve of the industrial revolution, before the Great Gatsby, before the Great Depression, before the first world war. Letting my mind drift, I daydream about a simpler time, a happier time, a time when people perhaps really were kinder and gentler, and when the American dream was perhaps a reality for more Americans. Ragtime music represents that older American reality. Boy, have we gone downhill since then? My mind wanders further and I ponder about the problems we face today – poverty, crime, drugs – and let my mind ask the question it asks from time to time: Is mankind progressing or regressing, evolving or devolving, growing or decaying? The question comes often; answers never follow.
I once worked for a residential property investment firm in Long Beach. We bought run-down homes in “crappy” Los Angeles neighborhoods, fixed them up a little, and resold them at a profit, during the height of a recent real estate market boom. The epitome of greed and profiteering on the backs of poor people. Now Black and Latino families in Compton, Watts, and South Central are paying three times the price for their cracker-box homes with faulty electrical wiring and leaky faucets.
It’s scary business working in neighborhoods like Compton. I’ve driven down most of their streets and alleys; we flipped over twenty homes there. On some streets the aroma of pot pervades the air, groups of kids sit on front stoops, watching, wondering what the hell I’m doing here. I often asked the same question. When you see a pair of sneakers dangling from telephone wires, that’s the signal that drugs are for sale in the house below. The store’s open, please come in. On some days business was really good. I remember turning the corner onto one residential boulevard, looking as at a painting with deep perspective, and seeing about two dozen pairs of sneakers, staggered down that long stretch of perfectly straight road, hanging like dead crows in the brown-gray sky.
My heart beat faster as I realized my vulnerability. Gangs, guns, stray bullets. Death could arrive without warning. Why does modern American society permit this situation to exist? I wonder who would want to call themselves Mayor of this city. Who could stand tall on the city council and defend this defenselessness? This is not what America once was; this is not what America ought to be. This is nothing to be proud–
The cheerful applause brings me to awareness. This fellow plays very well; the ripened ragtimers love him. When the recital ends, I stand, now headed for The Naked Dance seminar, a presentation down the hall by ragtime performer and historian Terry Waldo about Storyville, New Orleans, and the birth of jazz music. At the door, a man in shiny black and white tap shoes, his Oxford and navy blue quilted satin smoking jacket partly covering his striped cotton cheviot yoke shirt greets me, grinning like the woman I met earlier. He checks my conference badge, tips his red, white and blue striped straw hat, and ushers me inside. At this convention I haven’t seen a sour face yet. These senior citizens have seen a lot in their day, I muse. Two world wars, a holocaust, genocide around the globe, the threat of nuclear annihilation, terrorism and suicide bombers, and even rap music.
Rap music. Yes, as a parent who cringes as my teenagers listen to the raunchy, rancorous, and often ruthless lyrics of today’s rap music, I am confirmed in my knowledge that we have descended into society’s moral abyss. As a teenager, listening to my rebellious rock music, I basked in the glare of my parents’ confused and disgruntled faces. At that time no one could have convinced me I would make those same faces today. But rap music is far from rock and roll, and certainly nothing even remotely like ragtime. Is it?
As I settle into my seat among what as a teenager I smugly called the “Geritol crowd,” the lecturer begins by acknowledging he knew most in his audience did not come to listen to him speak, but rather to see the dirty pictures. The crowd chuckles, and many of the younger elders blush. The first slide thrusts before us in the darkness. She’s a young woman, totally nude, lying tantalizing in an exotic store front window, smiling erotically, looking straight into my eyes. I am surprised that I have become aroused so quickly, and my face has warmed with the rush of blood. The room falls silent.
Storyville was New Orleans’ legalized red light district. At that time, prostitution was so pervasive that the city council decreed it would be better to locate it all in one place rather than have it run rampant over the whole city. Unofficially, yet officially, Storyville was born, and so was my fledgling new perception of American society during the ragtime era.
Storyville was not unique in America, I discover. Every major city had its red light district. One retired prostitute described Chicago in an interview, well before the night it died: “The city looked like it was on fire from the glow of all those red lanterns.” Eubay Bowman wrote his famous Twelfth Street Rag as a tribute to Kansas City’s red light district. Storyville was, however, the most famous. The thirty-eight block region was not situated on the far side of town, but directly adjacent to the wealthy French Quarter. Its main thoroughfare, Basin Street, was lined with mansions, restaurants, clubs, and store fronts with grand gothic architecture. Storyville had its own railway station, where wholly unclothed women advertised for the local hospitality industry’s delightfully tempting room service in broad daylight. In fact, a gentleman with a few extra dollars could get a full body massage and otherwise have his tensions relieved right there at the station while waiting for the train to board.
Of course I am starting to wonder if turn of the century America was as naïve and prudish as I had thought. 1897 Storyville sure seemed more naughty than nice. And there apparently existed an even seedier side. While the front half of Storyville offered sex at Tiffany’s, the back half sold cheaper versions from wholesale outlets like the neighborhood Five and Dime. There, rows of rat and cockroach infested one-room shacks containing a mattress and a wash basin housed the less fortunate girls. Many girls lived a dismal and dangerous life. There, “a customer might cheat his whore out of a dime just for the laugh.”
From our lecturer I learned that in those Victorian days, ladies learned lessons of lovemaking that left their husbands much wanting. And men learned from modern medicine that masturbation might leave them blind. So when men couldn’t get any from their wives, and couldn’t risk taking care of it themselves, they went to Storyville and got plenty. Rich men attended opera with prostitutes on their arms, entrepreneurs concluded their business meetings with music, booze, and sex. No, naïve they were not. A turn of the century comedy routine included a ragtime song with lyrics that included the line “Please pull your finger out of Lulu’s ass.” Group sex became popular, as one veteran call girl wrote: “One’s fine and two’s fun, and three’s a real good time.” One bordello became world famous starring a beautiful young girl who danced, stripped and performed sexual tricks with a dog. I see that girl and that dog up there in the photo, and I am stunned. Yes, that dog is smiling.
Okay, maybe today’s society hasn’t regressed so far after all. I’m not sure if we’re any better, but perhaps we’re not much worse either. Maybe growth or decay is more a function of place rather than time. In Westlake Village in 1996, I attended a city council meeting one summer evening where the first order of business was the city’s police and fire activity report. There was some bad news. That past July, that charming northernmost suburb of filmmakers, record producers and wealthy retirees experienced its first armed robbery of the year. The previous month – seven months into the year – some guy held up at gunpoint the Mobil station on Westlake Boulevard off the 101 freeway, and got caught. By that same time in Compton, what many of us considered in those days the metro area’s southernmost ghetto, hundreds of armed robberies had occurred, as well as an assortment of assaults, rapes, and murders. Peace and prosperity distanced themselves from violence and depravity not by years of evolving, but by a few minutes of driving.
Rap expresses urban violence, and perhaps encourages it as well. In September of that same year, a drive-by shooter killed rap singer Tupac Shakur on the streets of Las Vegas. Police believe a Compton gang, the Southside Crips, committed the murder to avenge a beating. A short time later, two other gang members, including Notorious B.I.G., another rapper, ended up dead. Compton, rated in 2006 by the Morgan Quinto Corporation as America’s most dangerous city by population, witnessed 72 murders in 2005. That’s more than one a week. Yet I am no longer convinced things were better in 1905. The man at the podium reads a quote from his material: “According to an observer, ‘They say a murder was committed in New Orleans every ten minutes. Two whores I knew beat a man with a bat till he was blind for fifty cents.’” Did ragtime encourage decadent behavior then as rap appears to now? I’m astonished and absorbed, and less certain than ever in my ability to judge society’s progress or decay.
Ragtime and rap seem to have more similarities than differences. Ragtime, like rap, rose from the depths of the African-American soul, mixed with European-American style entertainment. Ragtime music was born of an intercultural, perhaps illegitimate affair between black and white lovers. African polyrhythms and European marches are the roots. Jazz, rock ‘n roll, and rap are all branches grown from the same syncopated tree trunk, ragtime.
Ragtime danced. Yet while it may have been happy music for wealthy whites, ragtime, like rap today, emanated from the pain and suffering of underprivileged, and often angry, Black musicians. Beneath its happy surface, ragtime contains deep and often dark undertones. For Black composers, ragtime represented the struggle for freedom over slavery. It is true that Blacks won freedom after the Civil War fifty years earlier, but what followed was a struggle over prejudice, cruelty, loneliness, and a hostile environment “more binding than the chains of slavery that had constrained their ancestors.” Today, while in some ways the Black condition has improved greatly, chains still bind many. Some of our modern inner cities resemble large prisons, shackling their not-so-fair-skinned inmates with drugs, crime, hopelessness, and despair.
Then, as now, raunchy lyrics often demeaned women. Jelly Roll Morton, hailed by critics as one of the founders of early jazz, and whose name may have much more to do with a female sexual organ and a bodily fluid than a delicious breakfast treat, registered recorded songs with the Library of Congress that contained lyrics about sex, violence against women, and even a whore with an attitude: “She pulled out a pistol and shot her right in her eyes / She said, Open your legs, you dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between your thighs.” When listening to rap lyrics, which have become mainstream in today’s society, even for budding teenagers, I wonder what the feminist movement actually accomplished in terms of respect for women. Compare the following lyrics from an early jazz artist, to those of a modern rap artist:
Turn of the twentieth century: “I set my bitch right on the stump / I screwed her till her pussy stunk.”
Turn of the twenty-first century: “If you’re tender and young, I fuck you all night long / I’m not a no-good punk, I didn’t make you flunk / I didn’t tell the whole world your pussy stunk.”
Fathers were faceless, potential heroines became heroin addicts instead, and many babies were born broken. Today we have crack babies and out-of-wedlock babies; yesterday we had trick babies. Trick babies, born to prostitutes, themselves became prostitutes, turning their own tricks as teenagers. While growing up, they often helped around the house, doing chores and helping mom. “They’d wash off the men, that sort of thing.”
Murder is a theme for many rap songs. By this time I was not surprised to hear it was a theme for lots of ragtime songs as well. And race impacted good old-fashioned ragtime as much as it influences modern rap. Wide-eyed, goofy-looking “negroes” prance about in cakewalk dances on the cover of early 1900’s sheet music: All Coons Look Alike To Me (M. Witmark & Sons, 1902), and If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon (Fred Fischer, 1907). Whether white on black, black on black, or black on white, the racial slurs span centuries. Niggaz 4 Life (NWA, 1990), Crooked Ass Nigga (Tupac Shakur, 1998), Kill da White People (Time Warner, 1993), Blow dem Hoes Up (Rap-A-Lot Records, 1991). “I’m black, with a bat, swinging at the head of a honkey…”
As New Orleans did a century ago, Compton today lays claim to being both the birthplace and the burial ground of a variety of famous popular musicians. Easy-E, who founded Ruthless Records and was a member of the group Niggaz With Attitude, died of AIDS at age 31. Sexually transmitted diseases – another scourge of both old and modern times. Some religious leaders claim the AIDS epidemic represents punishment by God for our immoral ways in today’s decadent society. We must return to our more moral good ol’ days, they might claim. Hmmm. One wonders what those same religious leaders would have said about the syphilis epidemic during those good ol’ days. Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime, and Louis Chauvin, and many others, died of syphilis contracted while playing (and no doubt sleeping) in bar rooms, brothels, and bordellos.
In fact sexually transmitted diseases were so prevalent at the turn of the last century that no fewer than half the soldiers who enlisted to fight in Europe at the beginning of World War I owned one. This situation led Congress to pass federal legislation banning prostitution within five miles of any military base. The law resulted in the closure of even the wealthiest of whorehouses and the eventual demise of Storyville. A number of years later, the city council who once raised Storyville in all its glamour and glory, now razed it, to make way for a low-income housing project.
Today, rap artists are mostly Black, while the buyers of rap music are mostly white. The same was true in the ragtime era. Both rap and ragtime became extremely popular in mainstream white culture, while at the same time demonized by “moralistic prudes and European-oriented culture snobs.” A hundred years ago the New Orleans Picayune called jazz music “hot, loud and dirty, a low streak in man, that could even do damage.” A hundred years later, the New York Times opines “When it comes to rap music, what's poisonous for the culture - and dangerous for minority youth - tends to be great for album sales.” I wonder if a hundred years from now a handful of old-timers will gather somewhere and cheerfully celebrate the good ol’ days of rap music, reminiscing about a happier, simpler, more peaceful time…
I want to think mankind evolves. Not just from one animal form to another, but intellectually and morally as well. At least in America, we’ve formally abolished slavery, the child sex trade, and dealt with even more subtle societal defects such as women’s suffrage, institutional racism, and sexual harassment. We unleashed and then harnessed nuclear energy, lost control of and then found ways to control toxic pollution, fought two world wars and then founded the United Nations. And yet the list of humanity’s crimes grows longer and more grotesque every day, of every week, of every year. Cambodia, Columbine, Liberia, Palestine, Darfur. No being with a conscience can claim we’re all that civilized.
I play ragtime, and the other day, home from the festival, I was tickling the ivories on my own black Steinway grand, and my teenage daughter moseyed by and muttered, “Why do you always play that old fogy music?” Of course she listens to rap – hip, cool and rebellious. I wanted to tell her about the shared roots and history of rap and ragtime, the syncopated tree trunk whose branches include jazz, rock ‘n roll, and rap, and possibly even share some of my musings on evolution; but as teenage rebels do, she quickly slipped her headset over her ears and drowned out my Joplin with her Jay-Z.
Ragtime, Rap, and Raunch
by Dennis Frayne
(Copyright © 2006-2020)
Bibliography
Storyville, The Naked Dance, New Orleans Notorious Red Light District and the Birth of Jazz (DVD, Shanachie Entertainment Corp, 2000)
This Is Ragtime (Waldo, Terry; Da Capo Press, 1976)
Scott Joplin Collected Piano Works (Introduction by Rudi Blesh) (The New York Public Library, CPP/Belwin, Inc., 1981)
Compton, From Rap Dictionary (Website www.rapdict.com, 2006)
The Great Gatsby Study Guide (Sparknotes Website, 2006)
Saundra Ros Altman’s: Past Patterns (Website, www.pastpatterns.com, 2006)
Dresses of the 1890’s, 1910’s (Website www.vintagevictorian.com, 2006)
Easy-E (Wikipedia Website, 2006)
The Roots of Jazz (NFO.net Website, 2006)