Word: blesh
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...years the standard reference work on Joplin's life was They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, a 1950 study based largely on interviews with surviving original ragtimers. But oral history is necessarily flawed, since recollection fails with the passage of years, and a more scholarly, rigorous treatment was called for. Now comes King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era by ragtime scholar Edward A. Berlin (Oxford; 334 pages; $25); it immediately supplants the earlier book as the most accurate and informative Joplin biography...
Still, it was a far cry from the only hearing that Treemonisha received during Joplin's lifetime-a run-through in a Harlem rehearsal hall. The black listeners in the hall did not like it. Ragtime Scholar Rudi Blesh speculates that they "were sophisticated enough to reject their folk past, but not sufficiently to relish a return to it in art." The composer was forced to publish the work at his own expense...
...syncopated cakewalking craze called ragtime was born just before the turn of the 20th Century and died in the blaze of jazz with World War I. To most jazz fans of today, it sounds like something still on the stalk. To bearded Jazz Pedant Rudi (Shining Trumpets) Blesh and Harriet Janis, it is "music of enduring worth, revolutionary in concept and development." In a rambling, diffuse, but "true story of an American music" published last week under the title They All Played Ragtime (Knopf; $4), Co-Authors Blesh and Janis lovingly tell the tale of "a song that came from...
Nowadays, ragtime is almost forgotten, except for the occasional rippling of Nola or Piano Roll Blues from a jukebox. But it is worth remembering, say Authors Blesh and Janis, as "a part of [America's] folk-song and a part...
...loving and instinctive expertness of her collectors' item records of the middle '20s, when she worked with Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Earl ("Father") Hines. She had quit singing in 1930 to bring up her four kids (later there were three more). When Jazz Pedant Rudi Blesh found her three months ago she was scraping trays in a Chicago cafeteria...