Ragtime was the popular music in America from roughly 1897 to 1917. Ragtime consisted of a syncopated melody over a steady, or non-syncopated accompaniment and included songs and instrumental rags. The rags followed a set thematic form (AABBACCDD) the themes consisting of 16 measures each. The “C” theme, or “trio” often changed key usually to the subdominant. In many rags, the fourth theme was the same as the second theme, only in the new key, however, with the classic rag style of Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb, the fourth theme was usually entirely new. Ragtime is highly danceable and popular dances of the era included the Cakewalk, the Two-Step, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear and later, the One-Step.

Ragtime shares roots with country music in black folk music and minstrelsy. Many of the early classic rags of Scott Joplin and his peers are based on folk strains. Newspaper articles from the Leavenworth Herald, of Leavenworth, Kansas, and the American Citizen, of Kansas City, refer to a rag as “a kind of grass roots country hoe down...at which black string bands usually provided the music” (Seroff and Abbott, p. 122). Fiddle tunes did not come solely from white sources. “Black fiddlers, for example, were omnipresent in the South in the nineteenth century. Slave fiddlers were mentioned often in the literature of the antebellum period, and therefore their presence could not have been unknown to white rural musicians” (Malone, p. 19). Bob Wills often cited black folk music as having a big influence on his style. He heard black music as a child growing up in west Texas, where his family worked as sharecroppers.

Minstrelsy influenced both ragtime and country music. The influence on ragtime is seen in the cakewalk. The cakewalk, which consisted of a series of high-kicking improvised steps, originated on the plantations where the slaves were imitating the fancy, high-fallutin’ dances of their masters. The masters, not realizing they were being made fun of, picked it up and by 1899 it had become a popular ballroom dance. It was the “cakewalk contest” where the couple judged to be the best dancers were awarded a prize cake that was the most popular with the general public in the 1890s.

The minstrel influence on country music can be found most notably in the influence of minstrel performer Emmett Miller on country singers such as Tommy Duncan, who sang with Bob Wills’ band, and Hank Williams, whose first big hit Lovesick Blues was first recorded by Miller. Bob Wills, with Duncan singing, recorded I Ain’t Got Nobody, Sittin’ On Top Of The World and Right Or Wrong, all songs associated with Miller. When Duncan auditioned for Wills, Wills asked him to sing I Ain’t Got Nobody. Apparently, Wills was impressed since Duncan got the job. The banjo, a standard instrument in both ragtime and country music, also came from minstrelsy. Western Swing bands continued to record rags into the 1930s and 40s, long after ragtime was popular.

Corn Shucks was written by Kansas City composer Ed E. Kuhn and published in 1908 by J.W. Jenkins in Kansas City. Kuhn wrote an excellent set of folk rags starting with Black Beauty in 1904 and ending with Pickled Beets Rag in 1909. Kuhn was friends with Charles L. Johnson (see Harvest Hop notes) and had bet Johnson that he could write a rag that would be more popular than Johnson’s Dill Pickles Rag. Keeping with the vegetable themed title, the result was Pickled Beets Rag which was very similar to Dill Pickles but couldn’t compare in terms of sales. Corn Shucks is actually a much better rag. Kuhn led a very popular dance band in Kansas City, the Red Robins, and deserves credit for being the very first dance band from Kansas City to make records, which were made in New York in 1920 for the Pathe and Emerson labels. The best known musician to come out of Kuhn’s band was trumpeter Pee Wee Erwin, who went on to play in many of the best known swing bands, including Benny Goodman’s and Ray Noble’s.

Ed Kuhn later made his way to Camp Crowder, Missouri, where a former band member said that he saw him there selling moonshine liquor to the soldiers. Kuhn’s most popular piece was a pop song called Just A Little Kiss From A Little Miss, published in 1921.

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