TEARING A PASSION TO RAGTIME
There is only one sense in which the word “rag” has any meaning in connexion with music, and that is not conveyed in the word “ragtime.” Ragtime is not, strictly speaking, time at all; neither is tempo rubato: and eminently safe composers have been known to score their music con alcuna licenza, which leaves the delicate adjustment of time to the performer. A certain number of liberties may be taken with ragtime, and beyond this point no liberties may be taken. Within its framework, ragtime is definite enough; and you must syncopate at precisely the right, the indicated and required moment, or the effect of the syncopation is lost.
It is only when one looks at the songs that one realizes what ragtime means. For literally, the music, which has always been with us and yet arrived only yesterday, has torn to rags the sentimentality of the song which preceded it. The funeral oration for the popular song was preached in the preceding chapter. This is the coroner’s inquest, with the probable verdict that the popular song was unintentionally killed by ragtime, which is in turn being slowly poisoned by jazz. A neat, unobtrusive, little man with bright eyes and an unerring capacity for understanding, appropriating, and creating strange rhythms is in the foreground, attended by negro slaves; behind him stands a rather majestic figure, pink and smooth, surrounded by devils with muted brass and saxophones. They are Irving Berlin and Paul Whiteman, and they will bear listening to. What is more, they will make listening a pleasure.
It seems strange to speak of the great George M. Cohan as a disappointment in anything he has ever tried; but looking back at the early years of the century, when it was apparent that he would be our most popular song writer as well as our most popular everything else, suddenly calls to mind that our Georgie, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, just failed to make it. Irish wit and an extraordinary aptitude for putting into simple song the most obvious of jingo sentiments were not quite enough. The situation which Cohan faced at the time was beginning to be complicated: the ballad song was becoming a bore; the substitutes for it had failed to absorb rhythms fresh enough and swift enough to please the public. And between dawn and daylight ragtime was upon us.
Enfin Berlin vient! How much ragtime had been sung and played before, no man may calculate; it had been heard in every minstrel show, and its musical elements were thoroughly familiar. What was needed was a crystallization, was one song which should take the whole dash and energy of ragtime and carry it to its apotheosis; with a characteristic turn of mind Berlin accomplished this in a song which had no other topic than ragtime itself. Alexander’s Ragtime Band appeared with its bow to negro music and its introduction of Swanee River; it was simple and passionate and utterly unsentimental and the whole country responded to its masterful cry, Come on and hear! Presently Waiting for the Robert E. Lee is heard—a levee song and one would say that the South had already conquered; but Berlin is first of all a writer of rag and the Southern theme is dropped (the negro music remaining) while he gives the world two further dazzling rags: The International and The Ragtime Violin. Everybody’s doing it was true of singing and dancing and—composing. For the day which was awakened with Alexander’s Ragtime Band was a day of extraordinary energy and Skeleton Rags and Yiddische Rags and Pullman Porters’ Balls, and everything that could be syncopated, and most things that could not, paid their quota to ragtime. There have been periods equally definable: the time of the waltz song, of the ballad, of jazz. What makes the first rag period important was its intense gaiety, its naïveté, its tireless curiosity about itself, its unconscious destruction of the old ballad form and the patter song. The music drove ahead; the half-understood juggling with tempo which was to become the characteristic of our music led to fresh accents, a dislocation of the beat, and to a greater freedom in the text. For half a century syncopation had existed in America, anticipating the moment when the national spirit should find in it its perfect expression; for that half century serious musicians had neglected it; they were to study it a decade later when ragtime had revealed it to them.
The early rags were made to be sung and they were sung, universally. What the departing queen of Hawaii offered in Aloha Ohe was swiftly integrated into the existing form and On the Beach at Wai-ki-ki is a rag in every respect, using material which is foreign only in appearance. (The fact that ragtime can without offense adapt the folk song of nearly every nation—and is only absurd with Puccini and Verdi’s worst when it takes them seriously—indicates how essentially decent an art ragtime is.) The nostalgia which later came into Hawaiian songs does not exist in this first greatly popular song of those islands any more than it exists in the Robert E. Lee or in When that Midnight Chu-chu Leaves for Alabam’. Berlin himself was not untouched by the Hawaiian scene and in The Hula-Hula he wrote a song superior, in my mind, to Wai-ki-ki, yet never popular in the great sense. The rush and excitement of Wai-ki-ki aren’t in The Hula-Hula; some one had told too much about the undulations of the dance and the sensuousness of the southern Pacific. Louis Hirsch, years later, did the same thing in ’Neath the South Sea Moon, a respectable piece of work. But it remained for Jerome Kern, a decade and more after Wai-ki-ki, to make another Hawaiian song popular. This was Ka-lu-a (out of Good Morning, Dearie) and in every way it showed cleverness and intelligence. For it was not a song of Hawaii at all. It was produced in an Englishy garden, sung by women in hoopskirts surrounding Oscar Shaw in evening clothes; and it is all, all a longing for—I think it is a longing for Wai-ki-ki the song, as much as for the beach. The old romantic properties are in the words, slightly set off in mockery by the premature and internal rhymes; they are suffused with memory and the music is purely nostalgic. It was not for nothing that Mr Kern wrote The Siren Song.
The moment Hawaii faded out nothing was left but the South, and here the music began to drive the words with a hard hand and a high check. An observer unfamiliar with the nature of ragtime would conclude that the American people had a complex about nigger mammies and that the sublimation thereof was in the popular song. The true explanation is simpler. The mother element is, of course, a sure-fire hit in the pictures and in song; but the nigger mammy enters for the same reason as cotton fields and pickaninnies and Georgia—because our whole present music is derived from the negro and most composers of popular songs haven’t yet discovered that the musical structure is applicable to other themes as well. (George Gershwin’s Walking Home with Angeline in Our Nell, Cole Porter’s Blue Boy Blues, about the Gainsborough painting, and Berlin’s Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil are examples of the transfer successfully accomplished, and gratifying, too. Best of all is Limehouse Blues, by Philip Braham, a veritable masterpiece in the genre.) There exist a number of natural themes—slavery, the local scene (Swanee River), the cabin, the food, and the train whereby one arrives. The genius of Tin Pan Alley has worked upon this material, and in both words and music has been amazingly imitative, uninventive, and dull. Yet the idea of taking a theme and so handling it that the slightest variation from the preceding use of the same material shall give the effect of novelty and freshness is a sound one—we know from the history of Greek drama. Alas! there was little novelty and the tradition was never firm enough to bear what they did to it. Yet they had their reward, if they can accept it vicariously, for one of them, not at the beginning and not at the end, which is not yet, took the old material and fashioned a great song. His name is George Gershwin and the song which, before the blue-jazz age, achieves pre-eminence is Swanee. To have heard Al Jolson sing this song is to have had one of the few great experiences which the minor arts are capable of giving; to have heard it without feeling something obscure and powerful and rich with a separate life of its own coming into being, is—I should say it is not to be alive. The verse is simple and direct, with faint foreshadowings of the subtly divided, subtly compounded elements of the chorus where the name “Swanee,” with a strong beat, long drawn and tender, ushers in the swift passages leading to the repetition, slow again, of the name; and the rest of the song is the proper working out of a problem in contrasting cadences, and in dynamics. After the chorus, and in another key, there is a coda, a restatement of the theme with a little more restraint, and then, surprisingly and gratefully, for the first time the introduction of the final bars of Swanee River. I analyze this song as if it could be taken apart and the essence of it remain; the truth is that it bears inspection and is worth inspection because it has a strongly individual quality, a definite personal touch. Mr Gershwin has progressed[7] in his technical handling of syncopation, as in Innocent Ingénue Baby (not primarily a song to be sung or for the dance, but to hear; it is musically the solution of a problem in pauses, and the answer is delicious); but in Swanee he is at his highest point, for he has taken the simple emotion of longing and let it surge through his music, he has made real what a hundred before him had falsified. He should “do it again.”
Irving Berlin