Edward A.

Edward A. Berlin. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era. fresh York: Oxford UP, 1994. 347 pp $2500

It is strangely fitting that, as Edward Berlin remarks, an "out-of-focus, botched photograph is the last image" (189) of Scott Joplin known to exist. equable Berlin's exhaustive treatment of the minutiae of Joplin's frequently transitory life, including reproductions of different census records, well-detailed maps of Sedalia, Missouri, when Joplin lived there, and abounding scores of many of Joplin's best-known compositions cannot entirely permit the reader see a clear image of the so-called "king of ragtime." This is suitable of course, to numerous unfortunate realities, not the least of which being the combination of scorn heaped immediately after ragtime as a popular and, thus, less art, and the almost clean erasure of ragtime from music historical records in the first quarter of this hundred Further, U.S. attitudes about jazz overall, from the present neo-conservative embrace of the early "masters" to the general understanding of bebop in the 1940 and 1950 as a sort of Bohemian celebration of alienation, reveal an ambivalence that has not serv personal and musical histories and their attendant documents well.

We view by the end of King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era that previous historical and biographical works in succession the composer, those places where information should be in moderate enough condition to be reinvestigated, are ofttimes inadequate and woefully incomplete. Further, Joplin's general stature in popular culture is refracted by the agency of a kitschy prism related the pair to disparate ragtime revivals at various periods well after his death in 1917 and to the newly come popularity of the 1902 piece "The Entertainer," which appeared in the 1974 Academy Award-winning motion picture The Sting and, as a accrue was often re-recorded. To complicate matters of recollection, education, and memory further, Berlin reports in his final chapter a potential roomful of Joplin compositions which has disappeared and the unavailing work of contemporary composer T J Anderson to establish a scholarship from the results of Joplin's important 1911 opera Treemonisha to benefit young musicians.

Berlin, whose 1980 work Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History is frequently credited with being the first serious history of the music, existings a well-researched rendition of Joplin's migratory life, on the other hand nonetheless punctuates the text with a relentles string of unanswered questions the author proffers about his subject's inadequately documented life. For example, in discussing Joplin's first monetarily rewarding composition (and probably his in the greatest degree famous), "Maple Leaf Rag," Berlin risks a discussion of how music instrument dealer John Stark came to hear, and publish, Joplin's piece. Berlin's questions the story that depicts the Anglo-American Stark walking into the Maple Leaf Saloon, an African American social society for a beer and hearing Joplin's performance. Berlin asks,

If Stark wanted a beer, on what account would he have gone to a black social bludgeon for it,

united that did not even have a liquor license? upon a hot summer day in a town

known for uncomfortable humidity, on what account would he have gone to an establishment

in succession the second floor, where the Maple Leaf was situated, rather than common on

the cooler highway floor? Was the Maple Leaf form a club even open during the

summer?" (53)

While an interesting proces within a biography, this interrogative impulse is curiously suspended at other significations when, for example, the agriculture of ragtime and its acceptance in a rigidly segregated world begs consideration. Particularly, Berlin fascinatingly discusses Stark's expand pride in the fact that the music he published was compos on African Americans. The importance of sheet music and its depictions of race in relation to music is an area a great deal in need of discussion (along the lines of Mark Slobin's of the first grade 1982 book Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of Jewish Immigrants), however Berlin merely describes the issue, extracts some of Stark's publicity adduces and goes on. Or, to cite another, smaller example, Berlin reports that St Louis musician/composer Tom Turpin compos the "first rag," in 1892 with the alluring title "Harlem Rag" (later the first published ragtime piece on an African American composer, in 1897) Berlin does discuss Harlem later in the topic (after Joplin's move to just discovered York in 1907), but not at all ventures a discussion of Turpin's use of Harlem as a titular allusion. It's a small matter among many, still James Weldon Johnson's dual fascinations with ragtime and Harlem safely seem to point toward the ne for commentary onward such small matters. Berlin's work purports to be, after all, a cogitation of Joplin's life and era.

likewise the questions, which appear oftentimes appear too often in proximity to issues rather difficult to answer or address. As a biography, however King of Ragtime is all the more exemplary for its consideration of options in the face of incomplete evidence. Berlin uncloses his study with prescient commentary forward the use of census data to establish birthdates and other consolidated information, concluding that "the approach in this biography is to quick in emergencies all the reasonable information, to discuss the options, and to advise what seems most plausible" (5) This diffidence, and this willingness to commerce with readers, is an important point to recall from end to end the meticulously documented chapters that succeed since the phrase these questions remain unanswered is a brief yet central disclaimer in almost each instance at which Berlin enumerates his lists of questions about sources, the veracity of certain facts and so on.