Banjo Rags?

[Dr H]

Hello Everyone, forum newbie here.

I'm a composer and multi-instrumentalist whose main axe is guitar, but with such an inordinate fondness for banjo that I own several and have been playing them off and on for over 30 years.

I discovered your site by accident, and was much intrigued by the "9-pound banjo mute". :)    But what really caught my eye was the statement, "...the vast majority is popular music, ragtime, and 'banjo music', or original music written specifically for the banjo" in the section devoted to classic banjo music.

While I've composed and performed music across the spectrum from Bach to Punk Rock and pretty much everything in between, I was bitten by the Ragtime bug in a big way about 16 years ago.  Since then I've composed more than a hundred rags, mostly for piano, but also for guitar, banjo, mandolin, and a few less ubiquitous instruments like the xylophone and the caliope.  I've also put considerable effort into researching the history of ragtime, and have pretty well established that the earliest ragtime was most likely banjo and guitar muisc, rather than the piano stylings most people think of as "ragtime" today.  And I  have been searching for examples of rags that were composed specifically, or at least initially for banjo and guitar. 

This has proven something of a daunting task.  Many, perhaps most, of those early rags were not written down or published, being most usually transmitted by ear.  When the ragtime piano era became established, the vast majority of publishers devoted themselves to piano rags.  Where rags for other instruments were published, most of them were arrangements of piano rags, adapted for other instruments.  This continues to be true today, where most published books of "guitar rags", for example, are filled with transcriptions of Joplin, Scott, Lamb, Turpin, and other giants of piano ragtime -- but precious few actual guitar rags.  I've run into the same thing with banjo rags.

I was therefore excited to discover at the classic-banjo site, a significant collection of rags for the banjo.  Many of these are also arrangements, I note, and the names of piano composers pop up here and there.  But there are some which do not bear an arranger's name, or for whom the arranger is a noted banjoist such as Van Eps, or Ossman, which leads me to believe that I may have found some clues to the ragtime 'holy grail' I've been seeking these many years.

It has been my good luck to have connected up with various web fora representing a huge wealth of musical knowledge and experience, and I strongly suspect I have found another such in the classic-banjo site.  So I present my questions to the experts and learned amateurs here:  Can anyone verify which, if any, of the rags currently residing in the site library were indeed originally written for the banjo?  And can anyone here perhaps give me some pointers to any additional sources of information about ragtime compositions for banjo?

Thanks so much, in advance.  Great site!

--
Dr H

[Steve Harrison]

Welcome to the group, I can see you've already found much of interest to you. If you search the library under my name, you'll see that I've arranged getting on for 150 rare and lesser known ragtimey tunes for classic banjo including all the James Scott rags. All my arrangements come with score and a midi, you may find something of use to you...all the best..Steve.

[Jody Stecher]

Here's a photo of Bert Bassett playing the banjo. It was posted some time ago by Marc Dalmasso

http://classic-banjo.ning.com/photo/bert-bassett-cello-ce

[Jody Stecher]

"The Tantalizer" by Ted Goggin is a good one composed for banjo. It has both ragtime elements and and march elements in it.  Funny that I didn't think of it right away as I posted a video of the tune  here a while back.

[Dr H]

Thanks for the great links, Trapdoor.

I notice a lot of those tutors lack copyright notices or other dates.  How do they determine the dates?  Some, I suppose, could be infered from the tunes -- Christy Minstrels places a era, at least -- but the others?

[Trapdoor2]

Most actually have publishers marks on them, some have LOC entry dates others have simply been dated via SWAG (meaning, I don't know how it was done). Most of the ones I own actually have dates in them. Converse, for example, was quite good about putting dates in.

[Dr H]

@ Steve:  Aha, so you're the James Scott fan! :-)

 

 

[Hal Allert]

Dr. H. I have a collection of old tutors on my website, Classic Banjo Resource, They are in PDFs and are available for downloading. I am reminded of Tabasco Ragtime Waltz by Chas. L. Johnson. It is purported to be the first ragtime Waltz. You might also just listen to old ragtime recordings by the banjoists of the day at Classic Banjo Radio, another of my sites that just went on the air.