AUSTRALIAN RAGTIME BEFORE 1945

This offering is about ragtime tunes composed by Australians from the advent of ragtime (1895) up till the end of World War 2 (1945) and before the first ragtime revival in which Graeme Bell was one of the leaders. It lists 110 tunes, with one or more sources of the sheet music for almost all of them and renditions for 109 that can be either played or downloaded as mp3 files and used for non-commercial purposes. I am unaware of any early recordings of the music presented here, so at least most of the renditions are recent, many being created for this project.

Once ragtime was established as a music genre in the United States of America in the late 1890’s composers world-wide tried their hand at this new style. Ragtime in Australia was stimulated by the arrival in late 1899 of 2 large African-American minstrel troupes: Orpheus McAdoo's Georgia Minstrels and Alabama Cake Walkers, and, 2 weeks later Curtis' Grand African Minstrel Carnival (headed by Ernest Hogan). Australian composers had their first ragtime tunes published in about 1900. Some, like their US counterparts, only ever created one ragtime tune whilst others were more prolific.

It is difficult to define Australian. Clearly someone born in Australia and who never left its shores is Australian; but what about someone born in Australia who spent most of their life elsewhere (like Percy Grainger) ? I class them as Australian, just as I class as Australian composers born overseas but who either settled in Australia or spent considerable time there (like Sefton Daly). Some of the entries (like the one attributed to Charlie Straight) were either written especially for a tour of Australian or during such a tour.

Much of the sheet music is in the files of the National Library of Australia in Canberra (ANL). The ANL sheet music used here can mostly be downloaded from their web site. Other sources noted are mainly State Libraries in Australia.

Collecting information on early Australian ragtime has been a long term hobby of mine, and all the biographic summaries come from my cache of material. But this web page would never have materialised without the help of several people, in particular Michael Mathew and his daughter Ingrid (supplementary research, editing, formatting and web site construction), to Michael's and my wives Beatrix and Liane for their encouraging support, to Robert Ayres of the Australian Jazz Museum for his formatting and presentation, and to those people listed below who provided renditions for this project.

I doubt this is a complete listing of the tunes composed and published up to 1945, and I would be very grateful of advice of renditions, sheet music or just evidence of other tunes.

David Beattie
July, 2021

ragtime.dave1 @ yahoo.com.au

The Tune List

All the biographic material is arranged alphabetically in a single file. Sadly I have been unable to obtain any biographic data on some composers, and I will be pleased to receive any material viewers of this site may have. Where there is biographic data you just click on the name to access the file.

All the renditions are for personal use only. To access a rendition, left click on the title to hear the performance or right click on the title to download the mp3 file.

Footnotes:

The End

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