Rag Peddler

Oh go 'way, man, I can hypnotize disnation, I can shake de earth's foundation wid de Maple Leaf Rag! Oh go 'way, man, just hold yo' breath a minnit, For there's not a stunt that's in it, wid de Maple Leaf Rag!

--Maple Leaf Rag Song (1903) Ragtime began hypnotizing the nation about the time the Gay Nineties became gay, and it disappeared years before the Stanley Steamer and the suffragette. It might still be gone if it were not for the efforts of a Sedalia, Mo., piano peddler named John Stillwell Stark and an entertainer and pianist named Max Morath. Stark had the good sense to start publishing classic Negro rags like Maple Leaf Rag and Sunflower Slow Drag in 1899 when he was in late middle age; last year Morath, 36, began playing the rags on television--and has become a sort of folk hero of the spreading ragtime cult.

As played in the honky-tonks and brothels of Sedalia at the turn of the century, ragtime would have won neither sponsors nor the approval of Newton Minow. A derivative of the Negro spiritual, it opposed a syncopated right hand to a marching bass, and it talked, as one wag observed, of the six days of the week the spirituals ignored.

Morath's bowdlerized ragtime first appeared on a television show called The Ragtime Era, for the National Educational Television Center. Morath now has 15 half-hour shows, Turn of the Century, in which he mixes snatches of cultural his tory into a formula of songs, monologues and lantern slides. A thin, volatile man, he usually noodles out the music first on the piano, then talks about the men who wrote it and of the day when ragtime was the "folk music of the city."

Morath now plays about 50 college dates a year, and sometimes holds after-show clinics for scholarly ragtime buffs. Morath himself was playing The Maple Leaf Rag on the piano before he could read; his mother was a silent-film pianist in Colorado Springs.

What draws people to ragtime, Morath thinks, is that "it is happy music; it speaks of a time of tranquillity, reform, consolidation and harmony in our national life." He is particularly pleased that his audiences are so young. "If I found that only the tag end of another generation was interested," says Morath, "I'd have dropped it long ago." Which means:

Git on boa'd, little chillun! Git on boa'd, big chillun! Git on boa'd, all de chillun! Dere's room fo' many a mo'!

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