It all started one cold morning, not long ago, when I turned on the TV and a Matlock episode was beginning. I've never watched that show, as I consider it for and older audience, but what caught my attention was that it opened with a very old ragtime piece. Wait a minute, I thought, I've heard this song before, a long long time ago. Yes, undoubtedly I had heard it before, and I recalled hearing it in an old cartoon. I copied some of the lyrics, which mentioned something about a "ragtime gal," and in a few seconds the Internet (which I half-jokingly call the oracle) delivered a 50's Warner Brothers cartoon in which a green frog sings ragtime pieces, driving its owner mad in the process.
The song is Hello Ma' Baby, and it is one of a handful of ragtime standards that are still known by name today (The WB cartoon is a delight and a classic; you can see it here). Hearing Hello Ma' Baby got me thinking about Duke Ellington's Take the A Train. But Take The A Train is of course a jazz piece, not ragtime. I dug up an old CD with the original Ellington standard, and it became clear to me that the delightful piano at the beginning of the tune has a definite ragtime influence. Indeed, Ellington was originally a ragtime musician, heavily influenced by Scott Joplin, the great ragtime pianist.
For some reason, ragtime also got me thinking about Lady Gaga. Strange, because even though I admire Lady Gaga and recognize her talent, I've never been into her music; I never paid attention to it, or at least never realized I did. But I could not scape the feeling that somewhere in her pop hits there lies a ragtime influence. I watched some of her videos, and the only influence I could find just by listening was a certain similarity in her piano's playfulness, but not something that could be pinpointed. I searched a little more, and found a fantastic video in which she appears live before a French audience. In it, the TV host asks her to play something classical, and she indulges him by playing not a classical piece, but of all things, a part of Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag! In addition, in her "You And I Video" she plays an old 1905 Shilling upright, just like the ones played at the height of the ragtime era. All of a sudden I realized that one of the greatest pop singers of our time has a very deep musical heritage. But it didn't stop there. Joplin was in turn influenced by Franz Liszt, the greatest piano musician of the 19th century.
Liszt was the first to tear up a concert hall with his performances, as Lady Gaga would some 150 years later. Last October, on occasion of his 200th birthday, NPR called him "The World's First Rock Star."
What a musical trip I got into, all thanks to an old Matlock episode.
--Mario Miranda
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