Opinion | The Long, Syncopated Journey From Scott Joplin to Beyoncé

Quick: What image comes to mind when you hear the word ragtime? Probably straw hats, lemonade and your kid trying to play “The Entertainer” on the piano. But in the 1890s and 1900s, the sound of the just-emerging musical style conjured something very different: dancing, drinking and sex. And Black people.

I was thinking about that the other day as I finally listened to Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” album. Specifically, it got me to thinking about how critics and scholars in the old days regarded ragtime as dismissible, while critics today revere it as an important part of our cultural heritage. It wasn’t just ragtime; it was all Black music, along with anything else that didn’t seek a place in so-called high culture. George Gershwin’s theatrical work is now revered, but it was once dismissed as the musical equivalent of junk food. Beyoncé’s album, on the other hand, was rightly received as art from the day it dropped. It isn’t just taste that has changed. It’s the way critics have shifted their relationship to popular culture generally. That change, which started a century ago and picked up speed at the halfway mark, has now become so much a part of how we encounter art that it’s almost invisible. But it’s a story very much worth telling. And it all starts with a tantalizing beat.

That was the heart of ragtime’s infectious appeal: syncopation, which played a tick-tocking bottom line against a melody that zigged when the bottom zagged.

By way of contrast, think of the best-known melody of a Sousa march like “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the one associated with the joke lyric “Be kind to your web-footed friends.” Note how the accent in the melody — on the words “kind,” “to,” “web” and “footed” — falls where the bottom beats do. It makes you want to clap on the 1 and 3 — “kind” and “web” — as opposed to the way anything Aretha Franklin sang makes you want to clap on the 2 and 4.

“Maple Leaf Rag,” a piece that Scott Joplin wrote in 1899 and that became a national hit still widely played today, is different. Lots of the accents in the melody fall between the bottom beats instead of on them. As mundane as that may seem, it creates a “catch” that makes you want to move with, within and against it. It is, yes, catchy. With its insistent beat and the hip-wiggly movements that it naturally inspired, dancing to ragtime felt sexy.

It was created by Black men, blending the Euro-American march below with a catch-me-if-you-can line on top that channeled African rhythms. Ragtime was a musical revolution, of a kind that could have happened only in America as Blacks and whites took cues from one another over generations. But elitism, Eurocentrism and racism kept American custodians of high culture from being able to see it. It took until the 1950s for a brigade of aficionados to start curating it as a serious art form, and only in the 1970s did the academy and the general public embrace it as essentially a form of classical music.

We moderns can’t feel ragtime as the hip, naughty thing it was to people when Theodore Roosevelt was president. Jazz, rock, hip-hop and so much else came in ragtime’s wake, all of them syncopated (and hip-wiggly) to degrees beyond anything Joplin, who died in 1917, ever knew. One way we can get a hint of it, however, is by listening to Royce Martin’s 2023 recording “Memories on Morgan Street.”

Taped at what was once Joplin’s home in St. Louis, the album brings Joplin beyond his time, into jazz, blues, soul and more. At the end of the eight-bar introduction to “Fig Leaf Rag,” Martin slips in a casual bar of post-bebop piano jazz as if Joplin were Erroll Garner. He takes the first two sections of one of Joplin’s most reflective pieces, “Magnetic Rag,” at a breakneck-plus speed that turns it into a kaleidoscopic spray, the insistent fifth underneath lending a sense of momentum and expectancy. Suddenly “Magnetic Rag” sounds like it was written by the love child of Chopin and Art Tatum. Then there is Martin’s take on “Lily Queen,” which Joplin co-wrote with a mentee and which has always been a respectable but lesser entry in the composer’s catalog. Martin’s version sounds like Debussy and Jason Robert Brown were looking over Joplin’s shoulder making suggestions. It ends harmonically unresolved, with a floating kind of worried shrug.

Martin’s Joplin makes us feel what people once did about ragtime in the same way as Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge” used house music to get across how the bawdy cancan music of the late 19th century sounded in French dance halls at the time. I imagine myself in college getting respectably through a Joplin rag and then yielding the piano to a time-traveling Martin. His style would have sounded as sly, relatable and brilliant then as it does now, and he would have stolen away all the ladies.

You can find another example of American pop taking a great fusional leap forward with no one really noticing in the score for George and Ira Gershwin’s 1927 musical “Strike Up the Band.” American theater songs at that time, although often quite deft, were sprinkled into plots that largely just served to get from one song to another. In such featherheaded circumstances there was little reason for theater songs to be about much but love and dancing.

“Strike Up the Band,” like ragtime, was different. With a book by the satirist George S. Kaufman, involving a cheese manufacturer who sponsors a war against Switzerland, it reanimated the feel of Gilbert and Sullivan with an American idiom. In “The Unofficial Spokesman,” who we would now call the president’s press secretary defends his professional silence in a Gilbertian patter number with a jazzy, teasing hesitation:

“Like a Massachusetts, / Massachusetts / resident who / once became a, / once became a / president I never, never / Never, never / Say a word”

(The reference was to the notoriously tight-lipped president at the time, Calvin Coolidge.) This is one of several extended sequences in which the plot takes place to music rather than despite it, including two finalettos. In these, along with ballads and dance numbers, Gershwin had a richer harmonic palette to work with than Arthur Sullivan had during the Victorian era, partly because jazz now existed. The result was a comedic operetta that included songs with “blue” notes and jazzy rhythms like “Yankee Doodle Rhythm” and the irresistible “Hangin’ Around With You.”

“Strike Up the Band” blew me away when I caught a production in Philadelphia as a wide-eyed teenager. “Hangin’ Around With You” always reminds me of the proud-looking Black woman who was the pit pianist, playing the song with arms broadly flying during the exit music. It’s heresy, I know, but the kick many get out of “The Pirates of Penzance” and other Gilbert and Sullivan works largely eludes me, partly because “Strike Up the Band,” and two similar musicals the Gershwins created afterward — “Of Thee I Sing” and “Let ’Em Eat Cake” — offer the same exquisite lyrical cleverness with richer melody and harmony that’s scented, as in “I’ve Got a Crush On You,” with early jazz.

That’s not how audiences felt in 1927, however. “Strike Up the Band” didn’t even make it to New York from its Philadelphia tryout. Audiences of the 1920s were less accustomed to satire, much less a musical set to it — “Strike Up the Band” is what inspired Kaufman’s famous comment that “satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Nor did music critics take notice. There is now an almost intimidating volume of academic and journalistic work on American theater music young and old, but nothing of the sort existed in 1927. Opera was “real” theater music; Broadway work was mere passing piffle. Even when the Gershwins made it a Broadway hit three years later by toning down the satire, pepping up the song list with some dance numbers and bringing in a pair of goofy comedians for shtick, after the show closed it pretty much disappeared until the 1980s and inspired no musicals by others. (If you’re curious, next week Ted Sperling will lead the MasterVoices choir for a performance in New York of “Strike Up the Band” that combines elements from the 1927 and 1930 versions. Did I mention that the classic “The Man I Love” also began in this show?)

It is a credit to our times that pop culture is no longer treated as unworthy of intelligent assessment. It seemed quirky when, in 1924, the art critic Gilbert Seldes praised the surreal comic strip “Krazy Kat” as “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today.” Same when the film critic Manny Farber deigned to write about how special Looney Tunes were, long before they had been institutionalized as television staples for generations of kids. They were outliers; much more common was the attitude Dwight Macdonald expressed in 1960 when he dismissed the “tepid ooze of midcult.” By 1975, however, fans of Hollywood cartoons were mulling over Joe Adamson’s survey of the work of the cartoon director Tex Avery, as intense and erudite as the typical study of Sergei Eisenstein or Jean-Luc Godard. Today, addressing popular culture with respect and fascination is unexceptional. One crucial factor in this shift was the blurring of the color line. Described especially well by Leon Wynter’s “American Skin,” this transformation gradually eroded the notion of Black pop artists listened to by white audiences as “crossover” oddities. In 1965 Beyoncé’s album would have been considered “Black music.” Today, it is American music.

And it is art. Any critics who consider its roiling blend of country, R&B, soul, bluegrass, zydeco, blues, opera and gospel unworthy of close attention because it wasn’t written for the symphony stage are most likely keeping it to themselves. The opening cut alone, “Ameriican Requiem,” ushers gospel into a white “country” space, appropriately so given how deeply gospel and country’s histories are in fact intertwined. Christian country music — the kind that used to be heard on the television show “Hee Haw,” for those who remember it, or in the Statler Brothers’ repertoire — was the child of country and gospel. Beyoncé adds towering arrangement and production to all of this, as well as a political statement about white supremacy.

“Cowboy Carter” riveted attention across most of America’s music culture, and it will inspire future acts of musical fusion, responding to and reframing Beyoncé’s brilliant approach as generations go by and the culture morphs along with them. It heralds a new kind of pop effortlessly melding so many sources across so many old boundaries that it will be a musical equivalent of today’s English language, which blends English, Norse, French, Latin, Greek and Dutch words and uses them with a grammar so shot through with Welsh-like sentence patterns that some linguists think of it as a Celtic language rather than a Germanic one.

Attitudes change, minds open up, progress happens. These days when someone creates a ragtime or a “Strike Up the Band” (or a “Hamilton”), synthesizing seemingly incompatible artistic forms in ambitious ways, they are much less likely to have to wait half a century for people to take notice.