A bit dramatic perhaps, but not too far off base.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band circa 1918.

When jazz started making headway in the late 1910s into the venues that ragtime had occupied for nearly two decades, a new musical craze was established while the older one started a decline. In reality, much of early traditional jazz was basically ragtime played in a free-form fashion with improvisation infused into it. Pianists had been doing this for some time, but the changeover into ensemble-based music helped to drive the excitement of the jazz craze, and led into the 1920s which are often referred to as The Jazz Age. Prohibition also played a role in the process since brothels and drinking establishments were shut down in large numbers (then quickly reestablished in the back rooms of many otherwise legitimate businesses).

The most popular piano novelty of the 1920s.

So pianists and composers were in a position to either adapt or move on. Many had trouble either understanding or effectively writing a music that seemed to have so little structure, and it was hard to notate for piano as well, so they simply vanished or played in silent movie houses and the like.

There was still some ragtime composition and publishing activity into the 1920s. Stalwart classic rag publisher John Stark continued issuing rags by James Scott and Artie Matthews until 1922, and even titled one of Scott's rags Don't Jazz Me, I'm Ragtime as a form of protest to the new musical insurgency. Jack Mills Music adapted by mining the strengths of composers such as Zez Confrey who took ragtime to a higher level with their novelty piano compositions. He was joined by Roy Bargy and Charley Straight who also turned out some marvelous syncopated novelties on paper, shellac, and piano rolls. But with the propagation of dance bands, the advent of electronic recording, the growth of radio, and eventually the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the consumer lost either the interest in or the ability to purchase piano rolls, much less sheet music that seemed to harken back to the days of organized syncopation. In short, there seemed to be little nostalgia in the 1920s since THAT was when the good old days actually were. By the 1930s, when the record industry nearly collapsed, the sheet music industry was in serious decline, and radio was the most viable entertainment available to the masses, ragtime was mostly forgotten except by a few die-hard fans and pianists who continued to perform it in between the ballads and popular songs of the day. The smattering of ragtime-related recordings of the 1930s were more along the lines of novelty pieces or collective riffs than they were of true piano ragtime. The once dominant genre had been relegated to "period" films, cartoon soundtracks, and grandma's parlor piano. This is, however, not insignificant.

When the Swing Era started in 1935 a few arrangers like Fletcher Henderson tried to revive some of the older tunes in order to provide quick material that would appeal to older audiences. But the overall movement was forward, on to more technically challenging arrangements by the orchestras of Benny Goodman,

Fletcher Henderson

The Count Basie Orchestra in the 1930s.

William "Count" Basie, or Chick Webb, or to the sweet music of Guy Lombardo or Glen Gray. There were also social changes concerning the increasingly elevated status of Black Americans in the world of music, particularly in the realm of blues and swing, which for obvious reasons of association with a much more divisive period distanced itself from the coon shouts and syncopated stereotypes of the past.

This forward movement continued through the end of World War II in 1945. At that point, with so many soldiers coming home and so many opportunities opening for new entertainment venues and portals, as well as a shift in the recording industry after a musician's union strike that had lasted through most of the war and seriously curtailed commercial recordings, some of the public once again craved something new, while others looked to the past to sounds that were more familiar. There were many divergent musical directions at that time, the most prevalent leaning towards the new Be-Bop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. There was also the continuing growth of Rhythm and Blues, and the emerging field of what would be known as pop (short for popular) music. However, a bit before the war started, something important was brewing in San Francisco, California, that would eventually contribute to the mix in a big way.

A group of dedicated jazz musicians who were interested in resurrecting some of the classic 1920s tunes by King Oliver

The Yerba Buena Jazz Band recording in 1942.

and other traditional jazz bands started gathering in the late 1930s, led by trumpeter Lu Watters. This group eventually became the Yerba Buena Jazz Band. The pianists in his employ over the next decade or so, Burt Bales and Wally Rose, were well-versed in ragtime, even though it was not commonly played at that time. Starting in 1937, they began to cut sides for small labels, finally getting a shot at better distribution through a famous set of sessions in 1941 and 1942 headed by Lester Koenig, the eventual founder of the legendary Good Time Jazz record label. The war interrupted their activities for the most part, but the band began recording again in 1946, often featuring Rose (Bales only recorded on one session) playing older piano rags. The YBJB had a small but growing following that bought their sides, as well as many devotees who came to hear them play whenever or wherever they had a Bay Area gig, one of their favorite haunts being the famed Dawn Club. Most of the members that passed through Watter's organization during the YBJB tenure played a significant role in the traditional jazz resurgence that paralleled the ragtime revival.

Concurrently in the mid-1940s, a group of animation artists and directors, along with a couple of part time musicians, were gathering for lunch time

The Firehouse Five Plus Two, led by Ward Kimball.

sessions at the Disney Studios in the office of animation director Ward Kimball. The amateur trombonist with the wild sense of humor also had developed an affinity for the King Oliver material, and he and his studio pals would play along with the tracks for fun. In 1947, a few years into this well-established routine, the phonograph ceased operation one day. Kimball suggested that they play on and see how the group sounded without the solid support of Oliver's gang. They soon decided that they sounded pretty good, and with Walt Disney's blessing (which they knew well enough to seek), they started performing around the Los Angeles area for private functions as the Hugajeedy 8 (incorrectly cited as Hugageedy 8 in some sources). In 1949, Koenig would also target them for recording, and his first two 10" LPs for GTJ would feature the now-named Firehouse Five Plus Two. While not all professionals (although they usually had a ringer on trumpet and clarinet), Kimball, pianist Frank Thomas, and the rest, all had a great deal of obvious fun both recording and playing live, giving their music a vitality and accessibility that the public was looking for. Thomas also pulled out some great ragtime tunes for the band to work with.

It should also be noted that Hollywood, which was impacted by the onset of World War II, losing many of its key stars, directors, writers, and musicians, had also been looking for material that was easy to construct and would be welcomed by a public looking for vestiges of the past that would ignite warm memories during a challenging time, both stateside and abroad. To that end, 20th Century Fox had already jump-started this trend with the Barbary Coast-based classic Alexander's Ragtime Band in 1938. Using whoever was available, the studios constructed a number of nostalgic properties throughout the war years and well beyond, with MGM and Warner Brothers leading the way. The former provided Judy Garland gems such as Meet Me In St. Louis in 1944, and In the Good Old Summertime five years later, both set in the early 1900s. Take Me Out to the Ball Game also debuted in 1949, right on the cusp of the ragtime/old-time music revival, starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. By this time, both Al Jolson biopics, The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again had been big hits in theaters, proving that the general public was craving even more of this nostalgia amidst the rapidly changing political and societal changes of a post-war world. Warner would eventually respond with On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon in the early 1950s, once the revival was in full swing. But even before that, musician biopics celebrating the music of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and others, reinforced the desire to relive the past decades. As for the soldiers, many who had been away for four or more years, the unfamiliar landscape with women in the workplace and the music they loved now reshaped into something very different, they were looking for something familiar. Culturally, that could be equated to a form of comfort food for the soul, which for those who had grown up in the 1910s was music like Grandma used to make.

The largest catalyst for the onset of 1950s nostalgia was accidental in nature, yet it set off the beginning of the explosion which would eventually be spearheaded by Capitol Records.

Bandleader Pee Wee Hunt of 12th Street Rag fame.

They had been utilizing new technologies such as magnetic tape recording and the slower 33 1/3 RPM record speeds. They were routinely creating content for radio stations in the form of half-hour per side 16-inch vinyl discs with separate bands for each segment. Given that there was an ongoing musicians union strike that had started on the first day of 1948, the only recording that was allowed by union members was that targeted for radio, with Capitol being a primary provider. On April 20, 1948, during a recording session for a radio show transcription for Capitol Radio Recorders in Hollywood, Pee Wee Hunt and his band came to the end of their session with a little time left to throw on one more piece. Hunt enjoyed doing older tunes from time to time and they were a part of the band's repertoire. So, for a joke of sorts, the band did a quick rendition of Twelfth Street Rag with a comic "doo wacka doo" arrangement they had been playing on occasion. It included a solo by pianist Carl Fischer on a questionably tuned upright piano in a ragtime style. They did not intend for it to be included in the radio show, but the engineer who processed the show ended up putting it on the master disc anyhow. A few weeks later, when it was broadcast, there was an immediate response in virtually every market in which it was heard. The radio stations pressed Capitol for a single disc version, and a 78 was soon released in early June. The single became an instant nationwide hit, finding its way to number one on the pop charts during the summer. Ironically, it was the first time that composer Euday Bowman, who had regained his copyright for the piece a few years earlier, made any profit from his famous tune, although he died soon after he received his first substantial royalty check from the Hunt release. Almost instantly the demand for more material from the ragtime era and the 1920s was suddenly outstripped by the supply. Somebody had to do something. That somebody was Louis Ferdinand Busch.

What was "honky-tonk" and where did the term come from? The origins are actually a bit murky in nature, but the connotations are substantially consistent, even back to the earliest references found. The first verifiable use of the term was located in the Peoria [Illinois] Journal of June 26, 1874: "The police spent a busy day today raiding the bagnios and honkytonks." The term "bagnios" refers to the brothels of the town; so if the police were conducting raids on these businesses, then honkytonks or honky-tonks were obviously considered as having had similar clientele and business ethics. However, some western towns of this period, or at least the male portion of the population, were very protective of their local honky-tonk, as noted in the Rawlins [Wyoming] Republican of March 3, 1899, noting that the town of Dixon, Wyoming, had just opened a "respectable café" known as the "Honky-Tonk," and that it was "destined to become a popular rendezvous for those wishing to well satisfy the wants of the inner man," whatever that may imply. Ostensibly, as it was described in the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1910, a honky-tonk was a small establishment with singers and sketches and a pianist, evidently on a lower level than even vaudeville and burlesque:

References from the mid-1880s into the first decade of the 20th century establish an approximate point of origin of what might be deemed a honky-tonk bar as roughly along the cattle trails of north Texas into Oklahoma Territory. As the Iola [Kansas] Register noted on Jun 23, 1893: "The name didn't 'come from' anything; it just growed." An alternate spelling was honkatonk, which allegedly sprang from some tale about cattle herders trying to find the local town for some entertainment while on the trail, and mistaking a gaggle of "honking geese" for a bass viol coming from such an establishment, making the sound "honk-a-tonk-a-tonk-a-tonk…" The BIllboard of October 6, 1906, paid it some level of homage just prior to Oklahoma gaining statehood:

While the nature of the honky-tonk as a venue had been pretty much solidified by the first decade of the 20th century, the musical association would come a bit later.

Meade "Lux" Lewis

The term was used in altered form in some early ragtime songs, such as in the chorus of The Aba-Daba Honeymoon ("Singin' and swingin' in a hunky tonkey way"), and even in a Chris Smith and Charles McCarron piece titled Honky Tonky. Early associations of it as a pseudo-genre were largely with country music of the 1930s, and even before that with barrelhouse boogie and blues. Indeed, the first known boogie woogie recording, released in 1927, was of Meade "Lux" Lewis' Honky Tonk Train Blues. While this association to the term in the boogie woogie genre was not quite a template, it was indicative of how the term would soon be applied to similar music, though as a description or association rather than as a genre. One further association was codified in the 1941 film Honky Tonk, starring Clark Gable and Lana Turner, depicting a Texas/Oklahoma style boom town and the "joints" therein. So by the time it was applied to resurrected ragtime music in the late 1940s, there was some understanding of what it was referring to—whether genuinely or not—essentially a place where ragtime-style music was heard and where it was developed, a rather narrow look at the reality of that music.

So, what creates that particular sound that many refer to as "honky-tonk?" It is actually a combination of varying factors, but it pretty much centers around a piano.

Wally Rose in the 1940s.

The types of tunes and method of playing is addressed in a sidebar below. However, the creation of that particular sound is covered in this section.

THe honky-tonk style can be played on virtually any piano, but a well-tuned nicely voiced 9' grand will not create a sound conducive to that style, even with the characteristic bass and percussion added. The piano tone that was heard clearly on the early Yerba Buena Jazz Band recordings featuring Wally Rose was the result of using older pianos—smaller grands, uprights and even the occasional console—which often had harder hammers than newer instruments, and older strings or difficult tuning pins that were a bit less stable.

The piano used for the Hunt/Fischer recording of 12th Street Rag in 1948 was likely an upright, possibly even built in Nashville or nearby, and had not been well-maintained, which is evidenced by the obvious drop in pitch of close to a quarter tone when that solo starts. It also had harder hammers,

Common Emerson Upright Piano c. 1910.

and many of the unisons of the upper strings (there are typically three lengths of metal wire string for each note in the upper five octaves) were not tuned together. Therefore, the honky tonk sound was not necessarily genuine to the era, but was more likely due to the use of pianos from that era that were a bit worse for the wear.

That point given, uprights tended to be the instrument of choice, both during the ragtime era in venues other than larger theaters and concert halls, including small eating and/or drinking establishments. They were widely available during the early 1900s, including a presence in the Montgomery Ward and Sears & Roebuck catalogs for prices ranging from $100 to $400 and had a smaller footprint. Many many of the taller ones had longer strings and better tone, when new, than grands under 6 feet in length, and almost certainly better than square grand pianos of that age. So, the upright was ubiquitous, and found in homes and public venues throughout the country. By the early 1930s, however, economy of size and the onset of the Great Depression had all but muted the production of uprights, and both consoles and spinets with drop actions became the smarter choice for many consumers.

Lou Busch with daughter Debbie and one of his upright pianos.

When the earliest honky-tonk recordings were taking shape, many of those older instruments were approaching a half-century in age, had often not been cared for, and were not exactly "gently used." With hardened hammers and strings that created false beats which made them sound out of tune on their own, much less in a unison, they were perhaps a bit closer to the poorly maintained pianos of Western honky-tonks than one might realize. But from the 1890s to the 1910s, these instruments usually sounded much better. In essence, the nostalgia created and fulfilled by these recordings was usually manufactured. The consumer was being more or less told that this was the sound they remembered, even though there is some solid evidence to the contrary. This further reinforces that the "honky-tonk" label was more applied to the style and sonic elements of the performance than it was a definable genre.

However, record companies jumping on the bandwagon of the 1950s, or the pianists who they contracted, went to some level of effort to recreate the sound that perhaps never was by preparing the instruments in varying ways. Lou Busch had a favorite upright that he kept at Sound Recorders from the late 1940s into the 1950s. Early in the life of Johnny Mercer's Capitol Records, they contracted studios in Hollywood and around the country to facilitate the recordings for their products, including Sound Recorders.

Striking area of a piano hammer, the area to lacquer.

It had also been used by Good Time Jazz for some Firehouse Five Plus Two records, and even Marvin Ash had rendered some tracks on Busch's upright just prior to the recoding strike of 1948. Busch recorded and produced several albums there as Joe "Fingers" Carr until 1956 when Capitol opened their own set of recording studios in the now iconic Capitol Tower at Hollywood and Vine. His upright had lacquered hammers (one part lacquer and three parts thinner according to some veterans of the industry who knew such things). This hardened them to the point where they created a very bright tone, but not to where there was any real potential for damage for either the hammers or the strings. This technique became common in the 1950s and beyond for that sound.

Some producers and pianists, again possibly calling on what they heard on the 1948 12th Street Rag, went a step further and detuned at least one of the three strings for the upper octaves. This was the primary method used by producer Enoch Light and the pianists he hired as "Keyboard Kingston", "Puddin' Head" Smith, Willie "The Rock" Knox and "Knuckles" O'Toole, and created their signature (and to this author, questionable in taste) sound. Others may have simply happened upon a piano in which the detuning was its natural state, and just went with it. Samples vary across honky-tonk recordings, but that sound sometimes evoked the intention even without the requisite bass and drums accompaniment.

A mandolin rail in place.

Light added a banjo into the mix, which further solidified a very unique and identifiable sound for his Waldorf Music Hall and Grand Award labels.

A third and fourth method were—and still are—available, even though their merit is suspect at best. One attachment, found on some four and five pedal pianos, and available for the middle pedal of some consoles and uprights (it is useless on a grand piano action), is the mandolin rail. It is essentially a strip of felt or leather cut into strips that align with the hammers, and each has a brad hanging on the end. When the bar is lowered, the brad strikes the string instead of just the hammer, creating a somewhat more brittle sound, even evoking the overtones of a harpsichord without the pleasantness of that revered instrument. These attachments were not uncommon on some older orchestrions and fotoplayers used respectively in places of amusement and cinemas.

The fourth method—please don't try this at home, or anywhere, actually—was to create what has often been called a tack piano. It is as tacky as it sounds.

A tacky way to treat
piano hammers!

The idea is to place thumbtacks on the front of each hammer, which will usually create a very thin and brittle sound, even more so than from a mandolin bar. It will also permanently damage the piano overall. The hammers have a thick piece of felt that gets its hardness at the striking point by bending that felt at high pressure around the inner wood core of the hammer, and then gluing AND stapling it to the wood. At that high tension, introducing a rift at the highest pressure point, which is the tip of the hammer, will start a split that could eventually tear across the felt, rendering that hammer as useless. Also, striking the strings with a tack head, particularly on a piano with older strings that have started to rust, will lead first to destabilizing the tunability of that string, and then often to breakage. This is particularly true of the bass strings, as the copper winding is quickly worn through by the tack. This method has been heard on a number of recordings of the 1950s in which the piano was sacrificed to the gods of musical chaos. But that is just this author's opinion (and that of many of his peers). You can actually try it at home. Just don't expect longevity from your instrument.

And now, back to the story!

Hired after the war to work with Capitol's transcription service (click for Lou Busch biography), Lou Busch had previously played with a few orchestras,

Mister Ragtime - Lou Busch.

and knew his way around the piano, and was also a fairly seasoned arranger. A little after the Hunt explosion took Capitol by surprise, Busch was promoted to A&R supervisor, and asked to see if he could infuse a little ragtime into some of their upcoming recordings. Among the successes in 1949 was a single of Ragtime Cowboy Joe with Jo Stafford and Paul Weston. In 1950 Busch released a cut of his own, the Ivory Rag, composed with Jack Elliot. It was backed by Sam's Song (The Happy Tune), composed by Elliot and Lew Quadling. The single was released under the pseudonym of Joe "Fingers" Carr, accompanied by his Carr Hops, referring cleverly to the wait staff of drive in diners popular at that time. Released in May 1950, it was Sam’s Song that managed a very respectable ranking of #7 on the Billboard Jukebox chart, and stayed on the top charts for a full three months.

Also recorded in 1949 was a single by jazz pianist Marvin Ash of Maple Leaf Rag backed with the Cannon Ball Rag. This was followed in 1950 by a small ensemble renditions of Fidgety Feet and A Bag of Rags, a rather deep cut from the overall collective of ragtime era compositions The sales for these were encouraging, and the relative success of Sam’s Song over the summer helped Busch and the Capitol brass decide to roduce a Long Playing record (still a new market) of ragtime tunes. Despite the fact that the music was truly ragtime, the title of Honky-Tonk Piano was chosen, although it is not clear who collectively was responsible for that name.

Concurrently, it should also be noted that the first edition of the legendary history They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis hit the bookstores around the same time, sending renewed waves of interest in both the music and composers, at least through the musically educated segment of the buying public.

Rudi Blesh

It was a follow-up to his history of jazz - at least through the beginning of Be-Bop, titled Shining Trumpets, and had been encouraged by Janis who joined in on the process. It should be noted that during this period Blesh had also been giving some lectures on jazz, and his bias against white people being able to execute it properly clearly came through in those talks and somewhat in the book. That rhetoric seems to have softened up a bit while working on TAPR, and manifested itself with a change of attitude toward white jazz artists like Benny Goodman and Bill Evans in his talks of the mid-to-late 1960s. Some of the changes across the four editions of TAPR also reflected this attitudinal shift, brought on by additional knowledge accumlated between 1949 and 1964. TAPR remains an important reference, although its format as a narrative rather than a studied history, and the amount of trust in the veracity of the information from old-timers who rendered flawed memories in many cases have made it problematic over time. Without the benefit of a World Wide Web, the pair still created an extraordinary document.

While researching the material for TAPR, which included dozens of interviews with a handful of remaining figures from the original ragtime years of the early 20th century,

Harriet Janis

and following the success of the 12th Street Rag recording, Blesh also saw fit to arrange a concert of ragtime in Manhattan, New York, at the Carl Fischer Auditorium on West 57th Street, a venue established by the 19th century publisher of that name, and not to be confused with the pianist who had recorded the piano solo on Hunt's rendition of 12th Street Rag. The event, held April 16, 1949, featured the band of Tony Parenti and His Ragpickers. It started with the Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin, included 12th Street Rag, Swipesy: Cake walk by Joplin and Arthur Marshall, Sunflower Slow Drag by Joplin and Scott Hayden, the ubiquitous Dill Pickles by Charles L. Johnson, and ended with an elaborate fantasy on W.C. Handy's Saint Louis Blues. According to a widely-published review by musician and critic Virgil Thomson, "The artists were impeccable, the program distinguished."

The Capitol Honky-Tonk Piano album was and still is successful in its intent as well as flawed in its overall execution. It flew off the shelves when introduced at the end of 1950, and predated similar albums from other artists by at least a year. The album included two Marvin Ash cuts, three pieces from Ray Turner, who was known to many as "The Hollywood Pianist," and three from Busch himself,

The original Honky-Tonk Piano, the first all ragtime LP.

billed here as "Professor Lou Busch" in keeping with the ragtime nostalgia theme. All of the pieces were authentic ragtime, even the newest one composed by Busch, Two Dollar Rag. It also sparked great interest in more material of the same genre. However, the Turner cuts were sped up so they were pitched more than a fourth higher, and were considerably faster, giving a false impression of his playing. The Ash tracks were more along the lines of New Orleans jazz, even on Maple Leaf Rag, than they were ragtime. Three different ensembles with three different pianos were used, creating some inconsistencies, but promoting the uniqueness of the artists as well. And the title—it was this title and the success of the record, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, that may have been more responsible for the label of Honky Tonk applied to most of the 1950s ragtime releases than any other factor. While it initially, as discussed above, referred to the type of "joint" in which the music was performed, it was quickly applied in the early 1950s to the combined style and sound of the music usually played on upright pianos characteristically prepared to sound like something one would imagine from that era, even if inauthentic. The term quickly became a synonym for ragtime—at least for a while. This was reinforced by the barmaid image and colorful description given on the back cover:

A veritable tidal wave of releases started to build up after the release of Honky-Tonk Piano, and it took along some existing recordings in its wake.

Paul Lingle's legendary Good Time Jazz record.

Rough House Piano by Lou Busch as Joe "Fingers" Carr

Lester Koenig's Good Time Jazz label gained extra visibility as a result, and he soon added artists like Burt Bales, Paul Lingle, Clancy Hayes, Kid Ory, The Banjo Kings and Turk Murphy to the catalog that started with the Firehouse Five plus Two. A GTJ album of Wally Rose playing real ragtime, albeit with the bass/drums combo in the background, also did well on his label. The legendary Barbary Coast pianist Paul Lingle, who had eschewed recording studios for many years, recorded his only formal album for Koenig, and then left the mainland to live out his final decade playing ragtime in Hawaii. Busch, this time going on the earlier pseudonym of Joe "Fingers" Carr, possibly at Capitol's request, followed the debut Honky-Tonk Piano album in 1951 with two more notable releases. Both Bar Room Piano and Rough-House Piano did Capitol relatively proud for volume sales. These albums were also increasingly better in terms of the quality of Busch's arrangements, and led to two more albums featuring his "Ragtime Band," which was in reality a tightly arranged traditional jazz band with a couple of extras like xylophone thrown in.

By 1953, mainstream artists were also making their contributions. Big hits were made of composer Cy Coben's nostalgic The Old Piano Roll Blues

Frankie Carle's famed album of Honky-Tonk Piano.

Charismatic Frankie Carle in
the late 1940s.

by everyone from pop singer Teresa Brewer to America's flashiest pianist, Liberace, and, of course, Carr/Busch. More importantly, 1940s band leader Frankie Carle, in some of his earliest efforts for RCA Victor after migrating from the Columbia and Decca labels, cut two albums also titled Honky Tonk Piano, the first one including the increasingly omnipresent Old Piano Roll Blues. Carle had aspired to be a professional boxer in his younger days, but the family was able to steer him away from pugilism and towards a musical career, starting at the age of twelve. So, he was brought up with ragtime music and often drew upon the repertoire of the 1910s and 1920s for his band recordings. His Honky Tonk Piano albums helped to further legitimize the genre given Carle's stature in the business and his exposure on the new medium of television. The collective Honky Tonk Piano albums became so popular for the well-known Carle that they were combined onto a 12" release a couple of years later, and remained available in various incarnations into the early 1970s. He only did one follow-up in the 1960s as part of his series of medleys of hits from various decades, featuring no less than 25 tunes per album! Carle's original arrangements contrasted nicely with those of Busch, albeit many were formulaic after a while. Frankie's popularity in the genre was probably just behind or equal to Busch's for quite some time.

By 1955 the field was rather crowded

Fritz Schulz-Reichel.

(see the lists on the next page), including a number of knock-off artists with contrived names to echo the "Fingers" paradigm set up by Busch. Many of them were otherwise unknown or uncredited pianists recording for smaller labels, included whimsical percussion that went far beyond what Busch and Carle had done in terms of taste and sound effects, and had less innovative arrangements, usually sticking very close to the popular melodies and progressions set down by the composers. Names such as "Spats" Hollaran, "Archibald Musclefingers", Joe "Fingers" O'Shay, The "Crazy Guy", "Barrel Fingers" Barry, "Happy" O'Hallihan, "Knocky" Parker and the famous "Crazy Otto" were appearing in record bins everywhere, although despite the kitschy names, many of them were actually fine pianists in the genre. A couple of the more unusual titles of this sort would eventually be uncovered as pseudonyms for one of America's finest pianists, a virtual unknown in the early 1950s, but certainly beloved by many by the time the decade was over, then again more than a decade later.

Enoch Light, a violinist and musician of some stature, but eventually better known for the music he promoted, was put in charge of a small record label in 1954.

Billy Rowland

Waldorf Music Hall specialized in budget recordings, charging 99¢ per 10-inch disc. He recruited both starving musicians and better-known figures for the label, and produced albums across a wide spectrum from classical to jazz, also trying to cash in on the honky-tonk craze. Among the characters he created were Puddin' Head Smith and Willie "The Rock" Knox, the latter who was introduced around the same time as another well-named ivory plunker, "Knuckles" O'Toole (originally Keyboard Kingston). The first Honky-Tonk albums by O'Toole were performed by the talented jazz pianist Billy Rowland [left], who later struck out on his own recording everything from pop to boogie woogie. Two of the records covered standard honky-tonk fare played very well, but they were followed by two unusual and often overlooked entries of Latin and French-based honky-tonk stylings. Both of these represented Rowland's arranging skills, expertly applying the worst of piano sounds into the best of a fusion of these diverse musical styles. It was the Knox recordings that were notable, however, because they featured more authentic ragtime in focused arrangements by a young Richard Roven Hyman, now more commonly known as Dick Hyman.

In 1956, Light founded Grand Award Records, and converted many of his Waldorf recordings into 12" reissues on the new label, most featuring colorful artwork on the covers.

Dick Hyman - Still in his stride.

Despite the promotion of the Willie "The Rock" Knox albums, the name, and perhaps repertoire of "Knuckles" O'Toole took precedence with the buying public. So when Light started producing new material, particularly after Stereo LPs were introduced in 1958, he tapped Hyman for the task. One of the best O'Toole albums ever, and perhaps one of the best of the Honky-Tonk era, was his Greatest Ragtime Hits. It featured 13 well-known piano rags and ragtime songs, plus two newer compositions by Hyman. While they did not stray from the music in the same way that Busch as Carr had been doing for nearly a decade, there is a consistency and originality about the Hyman performances that kept this album in circulation into the 1970s, even after Grand Award was bought by ABC, then eventually shelved by owner MCA. It was followed by two well-done albums of sing-along featuring a men's chorus and Hyman, a few years before Mitch Miller produced similar efforts. Mr. Hyman followed the "Knuckles" O'Toole recordings with one of Slugger Ryan, a Bil Baird puppet known for his honky-tonk piano on various kids shows and appearances on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar. This was evidently the first time Slugger actually played through entire rags without interruption. Every performance is a delight on that album. Hyman went on to record some of the greatest jazz, stride and novelty albums ever, the complete works of Scott Joplin for RCA, and scoring several films for Woody Allen, often featuring nostalgic music from the 1900s to 1930s.

A different approach to the genre emerged just a little before Hyman's albums, bursting into the world out of Gallatin, Tennessee.

Johnny Maddox in the 1950s.

A young record store clerk who had been working for Randolph C. Wood, the founder of Dot Records, Johnny Maddox was the first on the list to record for his boss. He was an avid sheet music and record collector who also had a keen interest in piano rolls. Soaking in all of these influences, particularly the better rolls of the 1910s through the 1930s, Maddox went to work with a pseudo honky-tonk style that actually honored ragtime very nicely in its presentation. Between 1952 and 1960, Johnny recorded no less than 19 albums of ragtime and honky-tonk. One of his more famous singles was a cover of Fritz Schulz-Reichel's Crazy Otto Medley, after which Johnny was often as closely associated to the "Crazy Otto" name as its creator, although this was mostly a public appellation and not Johnny's or that of Dot Records. Johnny was also one of the earliest proponents of recording piano rolls onto records as well, most with rhythm accompaniment, so that the population at large that did not have a player piano could enjoy the fine work of the arrangers of a bygone era. Johnny continued performing his easily identifiable style into the 1990s from coast to coast, including several years in Alexandria, Virginia, and was a mentor to many fine pianists of the 1970s and 1980s. He performed live well into the 21st century, straying from his Tennessee home now and then to delight all who come to hear him. Johnny died at age 91 in late 2018.

Women were also a part of the honky-tonk culture,

Winifred Atwell.

albeit more towards the end of the 1950s. Among the best was a native of Trinidad, Winifred Atwell, who really went at the piano with great force and accuracy whether it was performing pop tunes or authentic rags like Black and White Rag. Atwell applied the honky-tonk style to a number of pop tunes as well, and her records quickly became "party albums." She was one of the few artists whose honky-tonk and classical recordings, which she took seriously, were popular on several continents, largely Europe and Australia, the latter country being where she eventually lived out her life as a popular figure. While known in the United States, and having decent record sales there, she never quite took hold with the listening public. However, Atwell was soon joined by Del Wood, Gladys Mills and Jo Ann Castle. Wood had a straight out no-holds-barred attack on the piano which brought her to prominence in 1951 with her hit version of Down Yonder. Her down-home Tennessee-bred approach made and distinct right-hand style was especially popular among country music fans of the era. Wood continued to make albums for some 20 years, her primary performance venue being on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the long-running Grand Ole Opry.

The author sharing a performance with JoAnn Castle in Sedalia, Missouri, July 1989.

Gladys Mills, known on record as Mrs. Mills, had been playing party-style ragtime and honky-tonk in her native England for many years by the 1950s. Her albums were distributed by Parlophone affiliate Capitol Records in the United States starting in the early 1960s, and were considered to be of the party-themed honky-tonk variety. Castle is an important figure in part since she became a regular on the televised Lawrence Welk Show. Welk was a "sweet band" leader with a heavy Minnesota accent, known for light polka fare and the bubbles that pervaded the set at both ends of the show. Castle started out on the accordion, making her debut on the show in 1958 at age 18. Soon after, the resident honky-tonk pianist "Big" Tiny Little left the show to pursue a career on the road, with a frequent residency in Las Vegas, Nevada. Castle was tapped to play as a guest on the show several times over the next year, having switched to the piano, and by 1960 she was a regular. This exposure helped her sell a lot of albums with her good-time honky-tonk style, and she was still performing into the 21st century, including for Lawrence Welk Orchestra Reunions. However, while Castle, Wood, Hyman, Maddox and Busch were still cutting records into the 1960s, there was a change coming on the musical horizon that would take nearly a decade to come to fruition. Ultimately it would constitute itself as the ghost of ragtime coming back to life to reclaim itself as an historically legitimate musical genre.

The second edition of They All Played Ragtime, released in 1959, had a great deal of added or modified information that was sent to the authors by many who had read the first 1950 edition. Among the stories that were augmented was that of classic ragtime composer Joseph F. Lamb, spurring a few ragtime aficionados to contact and spend time with him to get as much information as they could. These included piano roll aficionado and historian Mike Montgomery, who made one of two recordings of Lamb playing his own rags at home. Another was music historian and UC Berkley college professor Sam Charters, who sat down with Mr. Lamb in the composer's home with a recorder, capturing not only his playing but his reflections on the ragtime era. This also shed a new light on the perceptions of how the music should be regarded in terms of performance, as well as indications of just how revered Scott Joplin was, and should be. While Maple Leaf Rag had been commonly performed by the honky-tonk performers of the 1950s, few of Joplin's other pieces were regarded or even known by all but a few die-hard players like Wally Rose or Marvin Ash.

Charters set out to change some of this, wanting to produce an album of Joplin rags played on solo piano. Sam's eventual discovery was a young English major student of his at Berkley

Ann Charters.

by the name of Ann Danberg, who he knew was a competent pianist who had also played with some college bands. He tapped the 19-year-old, who was already in love with her professor, the man who would become her future husband, to learn some Joplin rags ranging from Heliotrope Bouquet to the eclectic Euphonic Sounds. They recorded and released what is perhaps the first LP album of genuine Scott Joplin rags played in the classic ragtime style. Although Ann Charters recorded a few more times since that first effort in the late 1950s, she is now better known for biographies and analysis of beat poetry originators like On the Road author Jack Kerouac. The contribution that she and Sam made to the music still stands today as a notable pioneering achievement.

Around the same time, a Colorado pianist who was now in his thirties was building up a steady audience playing, singing and talking about the music from the ragtime era—and not just the rags, but the songs also. Max Morath easily persuaded fledging National Educational Television

Max Morath - one of the best
to ever take the stage.

(the predecessor to PBS) to have him do a show on ragtime, knowing that the sustained popularity of it in the recording industry would translate to a good audience. He availed himself of this opportunity in a grand fashion when in his first 12-part series in 1959, The Ragtime Era, he presented the real deal without the honky-tonk affectations to a broad television audience. The series won acclaim and awards, as well as a follow-up, Turn of the Century, broadcast from 1961 to 1962. This was followed by a series of fabulous recordings of his shows on the Vanguard label, again without honky-tonk and often in front of a live audience. His well-formatted shows were successful for more than four decades, and although he is now in his nineties and no longer performs, and may have slowed down a bit, he has certainly not stopped spreading the word about "Living a Ragtime Life!"

Not wanting to be left out of the wave of nostalgia, many television and radio networks started programming ragtime into the mix from the mid-1950s into the 1960s. Some even combined it with showings of silent cinema, often at the local level, but occasionally with national broadcasts of films by Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. This would continue into the 1970s with The Silent Years,

The Maple Leaf Rag from Those Ragtime Years, NBC, 11/22/1960

hosted by Orson Welles, and often featuring ragtime and honky-tonk music via piano rolls or the occasional orchestra and pianist. Soon after Morath's shows appeared on public television, NBC, as part of their Project XX (a.k.a. Project Twenty compilation series (1954 to 1970) of American and World history, produced Those Ragtime Years, hosted by composer and performer Hoagy Carmichael. Skewing a bit more toward authentic ragtime and away from the honky-tonk genre, but still a bit shy of the classically-based performance style that was yet to come, it featured one particularly special moment when 1950s ragtime/stride artists Ralph Sutton and Dick Wellstood were teamed up with veteran Eubie Blake and Carmichael himself on four uprights playing the venerable Maple Leaf Rag. The artistic and well-executed single take one camera crane shot had unique reveals of each pianist as they contributed their own take on the piece, finally pulling back to reveal the Wilbur De Paris band for the final strain. This was also significant for the mixing of black and white artists on the same television stage, which was still unfortunately a rare occurrence just prior to the Civil Rights movement that was just around the corner.

Wally Rose, who had been at the forefront of nostalgia wave in 1940s was also still somewhat prevalant in the early 1960s. His 10-inch 1953 Ragtime Classics album on Good Time Jazz was re-released in 1958.

John "Knocky" Parker at the 1966 Saint Louis Ragtime Festival with Edmond Souchon [gt] and Don Franz [tb]

However, instead of just repackaging the original tracks with a few more, the entire original album plus some additional selections was re-recorded in the new stereophonic format, and with a better-quality piano. It was ostensibly distanced from honky-tonk and leaning much more in the direction that was increasingly being taken by Max Morath and others, trying to present the ragtime genre in a more authentic context without the use of a gimmicky sound paired with a hokey "quoted" artist's nom de plume. Another artist who was making some recording history while not completely jumping on the bandwagon was John William "Knocky" Parker. Having started in his native Texas playing for Western swing bands, he migrated into jazz and ragtime, and had performed at one point with the Tony Parenti group. His albums of the 1950s had hints of honky-tonk. However, he took a unique and serious approach to the ragtime genre, having been the first to record what were then the complete set of piano works by Scott Joplin in 1960 (excluding subsequent discoveries such as Silver Swan Rag,

The author with Bob in 2000.

followed by similar multi-disc sets of the works of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (1960) and Joplin's fellow classic ragtime composer James Scott (1962). Parker would continue to play and record ragtime into the 1980s, nearly until his death in 1986 at age 68.

One more notable contribution to the changeover, albeit often a background figure by choice, was "Ragtime Bob" Darch. After having served in the military during and after World War II, Darch opted to leave the Army mid-career and pursue a childhood ambition of playing ragtime piano for a living. He eventually set up shop for a time in Nevada, playing everywhere from Carson City to Las Vegas. More importantly, Bob started to travel around the country as an itinerant pianist, much like those of a half-century prior, not only spreading the gospel of ragtime (again as opposed to honky-tonk), but learning more about it as well. Every town he went to had another library, museum, or newspaper archive that turned up more information. Much of this was shared with historians like Blesh and Janis for inclusion in later editions of They All Played Ragtime, but much of it was carefully used to seek out figures of the past and bring them back to notoriety.

Among these was composer Percy Wenrich, whom Bob befriended, and eventually had him honored publicly in a big way in Wenrich's home town of Joplin, Missouri. Darch managed to locate the grave of James Scott in Kansas City and saw to it that it was not only made available to the public, but better cared for as well. Bob uncovered many previously unknown works by ragtime composers (although in fairness to all there are a few questions and blurry lines about what was genuine and what was appended, which is simply a footnote to Mr. Darch's considerable efforts). He managed to get Joe Lamb his only professional gig as a pianist in Toronto in 1959 (Lamb died in 1960), and had the performance recorded as well. Darch also reunited legendary ragtime pianists/composers Eubie Blake, Charlie Thompson and Joe Jordan for a recording session, in stereo no less, that remains one of the better existing records of how ragtime was really played during the ragtime era.

All of these acts by Bob Darch contributed to the growing cache of ragtime information and inspiration. Bob was often more interested in seeing that the music and those who created it got the public recognition he felt it was due, than he was in promoting his own legacy,

The author (center right) and friends toasting Bob Darch in Sedalia, June 2012

which ironically (and most befittingly) is largely what his legacy has become. While he eventually became fairly well-known, although never achieving the fame of Morath, Busch or others, he also knew everybody and always had time for all of them, including the author who befriended him the last decade of his life. While it was a collective effort that brought around the second ragtime revival in the 1970s, yet another story, which ultimately codified Scott Joplin's proper place in American music history, Bob was usually one or two steps away from those who were more visible in this effort, often doing the pushing. Make no mistake that he could play a mean honky-tonk piano when called upon to do so. However, up to the very end (the author participated in his last public performance) he was ultimately interested in sharing the authentic side of the ragtime life.

So, from Mr. Busch to Mr. Darch, the decade of the 1950s and part of the 1960s saw the rebirth, or more properly, the reacquaintance of ragtime music to the American public and the world at large, in a variety of forms. While honky-tonk might be viewed as an illegitimate offspring of ragtime, it is actually closer to a misguided or misunderstood sibling. The genre of 1950s, and indeed the larger encapsulated genre of "space age pop," were both products of an age of diversity when America and the world were experimenting with new musical directions while still trying to hang onto or incorporate more familiar legacies of the music world. Listening to honky-tonk records now may seem a guilty pleasure of sorts, but it was part of an evolution of ragtime that kept it in the forefront while the more classical forms of the performance of it were still coming to fruition. So go ahead, enjoy it without the guilt!

Ragtime dead? Hell, I didn’t know it even had a temperature other than hot!