Ragtime's Father

Some people think that ragtime started with Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band. Others, better informed, know that when Berlin's song appeared (1911) ragtime had long since passed its peak.

Nobody knows how old a story ragtime is to the Negroes of the South. But the first man to write ragtime down on paper was a slick-haired Kentuckian, Ben Harney, whose songs Mr. Johnson Turn Me Loose and You've Been a Good Old Wagon, but You've Done Broke Down were hits in the gay 'nineties. Last week 66-year-old Harney, forgotten in the era of swing, died of heart disease in a Philadelphia rooming house.

A pianist, like all good ragtime composers, Harney appeared in Manhattan in 1896, thumping the keys at Tony Pastor's 14th-Street Variety Theatre while a tiny Negro named Strap Heel danced the buck-and-wing. At the time Harney's violently syncopated pianism, which according to contemporaries "could be heard for blocks around," was regarded as a passing fad. But it caught on so rapidly that by 1897 Harney was encouraged to publish his Rag-Time Instructor, first pedagogical treatise on the art of ragtime, now a collector's item.

Pianist Harney, who had toured the West and Midwest long before he started the craze in Manhattan, launched a nation-wide school of ragtime composers, active during the early 1900s. Prominent followers included Lucky Roberts (Pork and Beans), Scott Joplin (Maple Leaf Rag), Northrup & Confare (Cannon Ball), George Botsford (Texas Steer Rag), and Earl K. Smith (Hot Ashes). Oldtimers who heard Harney do his stuff, recall that his playing sounded very much like that of Zez Confrey (Kitten on the Keys), a little like Fats Waller.

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