ragtimeArticle Free Pass ragtime, propulsively syncopated
musical style, one forerunner of jazz and the predominant style
of American popular music from about 1899 to 1917. Ragtime
evolved in the playing of honky-tonk pianists along the
Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the last decades of the 19th
century. It was influenced by minstrel-show songs, blacks’ banjo
styles, and syncopated (off-beat) dance rhythms of the cakewalk,
and also elements of European music. Ragtime found its
characteristic expression in formally structured piano
compositions. The regularly accented left-hand beat, in 4/4 or
2/4 time, was opposed in the right hand by a fast, bouncingly
syncopated melody that gave the music its powerful forward
impetus. Scott Joplin, called “King of Ragtime,” published the
most successful of the early rags, “The Maple Leaf Rag,” in
1899. Joplin, who considered ragtime a permanent and serious
branch of classical music, composed hundreds of short pieces, a
set of études, and operas in the style. Other impor