Play Book Tag discussion

Imagine my surprise while reading this book on ragtime (that does include significant mention of other music at the time, etc) when I got to "Ragtime in New York City" and saw a song mentioned that I have been learning in my voice lessons''"Where Did You Get That Hat." Of all the songs out there--and there are many--apparently this was a surprise hit back around the time my dad's parents were being born. I knew it was that old, and it's not ragtime, but it was rather fun.

Now onto the book. This book has been published under two slightly different titles with two different numbers of pages in consecutive years, and I read the longer edition, That American Rag: The Story of Ragtime from Coast to Coast--same blurb, same authors, one year apart--same information. For me it ranged from dry and boring to very interesting with quite a bit of stuff in the middle. There is even a tiny bit of discussion of Ragtime in Montreal somewhere in the latter part of the book.

What surprised me was that while the first rag wasn't published in Missouri, that was the real heart of Rag, which is why the book starts there. It's not often we think of Missouri as being the forefront of anything in music--in my case, never, but then I have barely spent any time there (but I actually spent a couple of weeks there in the past), just not in St. Louis. The book discusses musicians, composers and publishers along with those who made ragtime piano rolls, so I learned a bit about the development of piano players (machines, not people, obviously I knew about that already) and then, later, player pianos.

So if you are a fan of ragtime or like to know about American music--ragtime is first and foremost an American invention--then this book is for you. If music history bores you to tears, you'll want to pass on this one..