Ragtime: The Original Rags

Another thing Maple Leaf did was to cross the boundaries of race, and very little at the turn of the century was able to do that. Ragtime was played in white parlors and drawing rooms as well as black, and accepted by everybody. Even the newspapers which were usually dogmatically separatist began to report ragtime events without bias.
Ragtime in the early days was passed down from musician to musician by ear. Nobody wrote anything down. Scott Joplin was one of the first to do so. Among his earliest works to be actually written was my next piece, Original Rags, composed in 1899. This rag starts simply and gets increasingly complex. It stops abruptly, another characteristic of ragtime. There's an appoggiatura in the B strain. I don't know exactly what that is, but I really like the word. So listen for the appoggiatura *.

*OK. So I do know what it means. An appoggiatura is an embellishing note that precedes another note and takes a portion of its time, as do the first, third, fifth and seventh notes in the B strain of Original Rags. Got that?