First published 23rd August 2023 on the Sugarfoot Stomp Facebook Community Group.

Part 5: Ragtime

It’s time for my fifth post summarising “The Power of Black Music” by Samuel Floyd. Last time I wrote about blues music and dance. I emphasised their African origin and how the spirituals provided a vehicle to maintain cultural memory of the “party of the gods” ritual through slavery, allowing black people to recreate the ritual in an unabashedly secular context - jookin’ blues dance. This post, however, is about ragtime music and dance, which have significant European influences, far more so than blues.

This post is longer than the rest because, as it turns out, no discussion of how black dancers and musicians incorporate European forms into their art is complete without some pretty dense concepts from black culture and black sociology - namely African-American Modernism, Signifyin’, and Renaissancism. This post uses African-American Modernism and Signifyin’ to analyse ragtime, and my next post will use Signifyin’ and Renaissancism to analyse jazz and the Harlem Renaissance.

African-American Modernism

As I described last time, in the late 1800s, Black Americans increasingly came to reject African myth and community in favour of individualism and rationality to navigate the urban environment. At the same time, social strata emerged in the black community - including rural peasantry, urban workers, and the growing black urban middle and upper classes. Several new philosophies arose to respond to the apostasy against African mythology, and were backed more by different classes than others.

Some embraced Christianity, but continued to worship in an African style - epitomised by gospel. Some resisted the apostasy, aspiring to maintain African-American community in an atomized context - epitomised by blues and its ring-derived music played by solo musicians and ring dances performed solo. This approach was preferred by black farmers and travellers.

Still others actively rejected African mythology and community in favour of rationality, in an approach known as African-American Modernism, supported by the black middle class and elite. Musically, this is epitomised by ragtime, and especially Scott Joplin’s folk opera Treemonisha. “Set in 1884 rural Arkansas near the Red River, the work rejects ‘ignorance and superstition’ and looks forward to the ‘raising of the race’ through education.” The opera is an impressive synthesis of African folk music and dance with European grand operas and choreography.

African-American Modernism was designed to win black rights on white people’s terms. To be taken seriously, blacks were forced to use the minstrel mask as a “governing object” in a “ritual of non-sense” where they would caricaturize their own culture to win material gain. “It was necessary for any African American who would be heard and taken seriously by whites in the 1890s to communicate through a discursive, verbally rhetorical manifestation of the mask.” This approach proved itself successful in 1895 when Brooker T. Washington used it to win an industrial education for a large portion of the nation’s black citizens.

The other way black people would win acceptance on white people’s terms is by producing art in a white medium to spread “race improvement” messaging in a language they could agree with - just like the opera Treemonisha. Renaissancism continued this trend, with great success, in 1920’s Harlem, which I will cover in my next post.

Signifyin’

The response to apostasy that proved the most successful was Signifyin’ - a very sophisticated strategy developed by the black urban working class. The rationality of African American Modernism led much of the black community to believe that serving in WWI would win them acceptance with white communities in the north, helping cause the Great Migration. In reality, white people violently resisted the Great Migration and the black working class became cynical of both modernism and “rural naivete,” instead combining modernist rationality with the ancient African trickster model to create Signifyin’.

They used the toast of the Signifyin’ Monkey as their model. I am going to provide my own working definition of Signifyin’, and then I would highly recommend listening to the toast yourself to see what urban blacks embody when they signify.

Signifyin’: Implicative, loud-talking wordplay that demands attention to the signifier, and mocks the signified to reverse power. In black culture, it is almost synonymous with rapping, toasting, testifying, dissing, and playing the dozens.

The European concept that is the most similar is mockery, but there are two key differences: Signifyin’ brings attention to the signifier unlike mockery which highlights the object of the mockery, and Signifyin’ is a culturally celebrated, sophisticated skill that elevates the signifier, whereas mockery is a low blow that brings the mocker down to the mocked’s level.

The signifier treats the signified as a value-neutral trope to be “censured,” “extended” and “revised.” For example, black music can mock and signify existing black and white forms alike, bringing attention to the musician's story either way. On the other hand white minstrel shows bring attention to and denigrate black culture, and never critically engage with white culture.

Now listen to a recording of the Signifyin’ Monkey toast by Oscar Brown, Jr (lyrics). It is the African trickster myth Why Monkeys Live In Trees, but rewritten for an urban American context. Lion is the Jungle King - an oppressive ruler that represents a white authority figure. Signifyin' Monkey represents a black man - marginalised into “the trees” under the threat of violence. Signifyin’ trickery was a way to win attention without giving in to the “monkey” expectation and wearing the metaphorical minstrel mask. Instead, they “deformed the minstrel mask” by mocking and signifying both black and white culture by displaying authentic black culture.

They mocked and signified black culture the way the monkey signified the Elephant - as if to say hey, look at these other black signifiers “goin’ ‘roun’ talkin’, I’m sorry to say, about yo’ momma in a scandalous way!” - a way to criticise authorities by pointing out prevailing black cultural sentiment and implying one doesn’t agree with the criticism to avoid becoming a target oneself.

They mocked and signified white culture the way the monkey signified the Lion himself - as if to say “What is this beat-up mess I see?” “You big overgrown pussycat, don’ choo roar, or I’ll hop down there an’ whip you some more!” - consolidating advantage and maintaining attention on black culture by signifying white culture in times of relative advantage - when “up in the trees” and out of reach.

“It is as if, after giving birth to the bluesmen on the eve of the Great Migration, Esu - a victim of the apostasies of modernism - perished and was reborn as a new and ‘citified’ trickster. Esu’s demise had been caused by the modernists’ rejection of myth, but in his place came the more rational and acceptable slickster - the Signifyin’ Monkey.”

If you’re curious, here’s an extended X-rated comedy rendition of Signifyin’ Monkey. This is more similar to the way it is actually recited.

Signifyin’ in Music

The author clarifies that even though Signifyin’ was fully developed and named in the early 1900’s, it can be traced back to Africa, especially African storytelling, rhyming games and other musical improvisation. It is the primary aesthetic factor behind call-and-response.

Listen to this recording of St Louis Blues by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. Notice how Louis’ trumpet mocks and signifies Bessie’s singing and blues melodies in general. Bessie sings melancholy lyrics in a moaning voice, while Louis loudly and playfully mocks her sadness with bright, shouted elaborations of her melodies. In other words, he is Signifyin’ - “Implicative, loud-talking wordplay that demands attention to the signifier, and mocks the signified to reverse power.” Mocking and signifying “the blues” is in keeping with blues music’s role as uplifting dance music. Add some percussive, cool, controlled, grounded dance to complete your mental image.

Ragtime

Folk rags emerged along with blues shortly after emancipation. They were dance songs that signified black and white secular songs and hymns by playing playful, polyrhythmic interpretations of them in quick succession with a medley format. They were mostly played on fiddles and banjos. Blind Boone, who played folk rags on piano in the 1870’s and 80’s, recorded some piano rolls in 1912. Let’s listen to Rag Medley No. 2, which makes a medley out of seven different popular black and white secular tunes in the form ABACA DDEEFFFF GGABA.

Firstly, notice the “throbbing bass” - the left hand bounces between bass notes on odd beats and accented chords on even beats - this comes from clapping in the ring. He only breaks the steady pulse to play elaborate fills that signify arhythmic white social dance music.

Secondly, the right hand melodies are not syncopated or “ragged” but polyrhythmic - he mostly plays 16th note lines that intersect with the harmony in a tressillo pattern - a sophisticated African dance music rhythm. The idea that the term “ragtime” comes from “ragged rhythms” was invented by white listeners in the early 1900’s to explain these unfamiliar polyrhythms and cross-rhythms as mere syncopations. In reality “ragtime” refers to the “raggin’” dance which involves flaunting rags (handkerchiefs) above one’s head.

Folk rags later led to New Orleans ragtime (e.g. Jelly Roll Morton), which stayed very similar to folk ragtime, St. Louis ragtime (e.g. Scott Joplin) which combined folk rags with classical Euro-American marches, and East Coast ragtime (e.g. Jack the Bear) which eventually became Harlem Stride - more on that next time.

Raggin’ is a descendant of the cakewalk - where slaves would use inter-plantation slave dancing competitions as an opportunity to mock and signify white dance. Raggin’ came to incorporate European forms, but the content remained African. They signified both African and European forms, using characteristic African bodily movement to critique them both. “Characterised by the stamping, patting and clapping that create propulsive, provocative and off-beat rhythms, African-American dances and African-American versions of imported European dances were performed in the African Tradition.”

Ragtime is also the beginning of black partnered dance. The form of these dances must be European because partnered dance was not a thing in Africa. The content, however, remained largely African. Strict European lead/follow dynamics were substituted for call-and-response, the footwork was more improvised, and African dance fundamentals such as posture and hip movement were used. These were all deliberate signifyin’ revisions of white dance forms, not passive adoption of them.

These partnered dances included slow drag (early blues dance - Demo - Julie Brown and Shawn Hershey) and rag two-step (the partnered ancestor of Lindy Hop - Demo - Laurel Ryan and Jamin Jackson). If you watch the rag two-step video, you will see they are signifyin’ white partnered dance with an exaggerated hoity-toity aesthetic, but that their improvisation, call-and-response, posture, footwork and hip movement is fundamentally African-American. Side note - Frankie Manning would later famously reintroduce a full-blown West African dance posture into the Lindy Hop, signifyin’ black solo dance to reintroduce more African form into the dance.

Signifyin’ in Dance and Key Takeaways

At the end of the chapter on Signifyin’, Floyd makes a critical observation that highlights the importance of signifyin’ in connecting black music and dance in the ring and its descendant rituals. “The importance of the Signifying Monkey poems is their repeated stress on the materiality of the signifier itself.” In order for the signifier to demand attention, Signifyin’ is a full-body, in-person practice.

In a musical context, “the movements of the instruments, the movements of an individual’s libs, torso, shoulders, head, neck and eyes - even the wrinkling of the forehead - accompany the sonic gestures made by the musicians, the musical troping they perform on or within the tune or figure, in whole or in part, as they make the performance.”

This full-body musical Signifyin’ and willful play is “the dominant mode of discourse in the ring,” which makes it rife with cultural memory, especially because the Signifyin’ Monkey, and therefore Esu, is “the interpreter and connector to African mythology and the roots of black culture.” The implications of this for modern practitioners of black dance is profound, so I’ll quote the author at length, he says it much better than I ever could:

“When dancers are dancing it is how they relate to what the musicians play that make the dance a success, for it is the dancers physical Signifyin’ that excites other dancers and musicians alike: a bump here, a grind there, a nod here, a dip there. Within black life, it is culturally, socially, and artistically significant - something fraught with cultural memory and, in that sense, quite meaningful to actual and potential signifiers.”

Signifyin’ is a sophisticated skill that is difficult to develop outside of black barbershops and street corners, but you can get some idea of the general aesthetic from toasting and its relatives - by watching black comedy, hip hop and bebop improvisation performances, as well as of course watching black dancers.

Thanks for reading this post, it ended up being about twice as long as I planned, who knew black music could get so political? (this is a joke) The next one will be about the Harlem Renaissance, jazz music, and jazz dance.

Cam