Still Shuffling

No two composers have benefited more from the current ragtime revival than those legendary figures Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake. Joplin, who died in 1917, has been championed largely by such "legitimate" pianists as Joshua Rifkin and William Bolcom, as well as Dancer-Stage Director Katherine Dunham, who mounted Joplin's opera Treemonisha in Atlanta last February. Blake's champion? Why, Eubie himself.

Though Blake will be 90 in February, he played in Manhattan's Lincoln Center last week as though he were a youthful 70. Prancing out on only slightly creaky legs, he clasped his hands over his head like a boxing champ, then scurried for the security of the piano bench. There he launched energetically into his own Troublesome Ivories, which turned out not to be troublesome at all. At the end of W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues, Blake set off a series of feathery right-hand twirls up the scale that must have been what was originally meant by the oft-abused phrase tickling the ivories.

Blake needed no assisting rhythm section. The highly audible rat-tat-tat of his heels filled that bill. His technique is in the percussive, pedal-heavy ragtime tradition--bouncing, thump-pah bass and ornate, syncopated melody--but it is nonetheless astounding in its flawlessly striding left hand and daringly acrobatic right. Blake still practices two hours a day; he works so much on the eve of a concert that "I get sick of hearing myself." Midway through a delirious rendition of his brand-new Classical Rag, Blake cried out, "Aha, it sounds good to me!"

James Hubert Blake has been sounding good to a lot of people ever since he composed his first ragtime piece, Charleston Rag, at the age of 16. Born and raised in Baltimore, Eubie was the son of freed slaves. "My father would show me the stripes on his back," he recalls. "He looked like a leopard. My mother would say, 'Don't tell that boy about slavery.' My father said, 'Yes, I want him to know,' and he would say, 'Don't hate the people for that; they thought they were right.' "

When Blake moved into vaudeville in 1902 at the Academy of Music on New York City's 14th Street, he still found vestiges of oppression. "Every night after the show, they backed a wagon up to the stage door on 13th Street and carted us down to Bleecker Street. In those days, the colored artists had to stay in crumb joints. We couldn't even go to the door of a good hotel."

Two decades later, New York's front doors began opening to Blake as the composer of such Negro-flavored Broadway musicals as Elsie and Chocolate Dandies. His biggest hit was a startlingly original synthesis of ragtime and operetta called Shuffle Along. Written with Blake's old vaudeville partner, Lyricist Noble Sissle, Shuffle ran for 18 months in 1921-22 and introduced both jazz dancing and Josephine Baker to Broadway. Two of his show tunes were destined to become standards in the pop world and steady royalty producers for him: Memories of You and I'm Just Wild About Harry.

Blake has no secret for longevity, other than his daily vitamins and late-morning sleep--or his remarkably carefree attitude about the whole thing. He has been smoking cigarettes, for example, since he was six, and has no intention of quitting. These days he is busy touring the college campuses, playing festivals like the Newport Jazz Festival, and invading major concert halls in such cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and, of course, New York. In between, he "rests up" in his modest, nine-room house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and sometimes lets his mind wander back over times gone by. Like the night when he was eight and thought there was a ghost in the backyard. Actually, it was a white shirt hanging on the clothesline. His father took him outside, made him touch the shirt, then whipped him. "He only whipped me three times in his life and each time it was for being afraid," says Blake. "So I'm not afraid of anything."

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