Eubie Blake

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Eubie Blake (February 7, 1883 - February 12, 1983).

[edit] Early Life

Eubie Blake was a popular pianist and composer. There is some contoversy to his birth date. He gave his birth year as 1887 when enlisting in the army. That was the only time he used that year. He did this most likely to avoid combat. He himself never claimed he was born in 1887 after that incident. His first hit Elite Syncopations he released in 1899, that would make him 12 and there is no evidence he was composing at that age.

[edit] Ragtime Years

Ragtime music, with its syncopated, polyrhythmic style, was born, according to cultural historian Robert Snyder, in the 1890s in the black saloons and brothels of southern and midwestern cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. But it also owed a great deal to march music, especially the sort of quasi-military march music most famously associated with John Philip Sousa. It was at the center of American popular music from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1920s.

Ragtime, for most Americans, meant a tinkling piano; ragtime was original jazz music and no one played the ragtime piano any better or longer than Eubie Blake. Blake, a musician, composer, and performer born in Baltimore in 1883, published his first rags in 1914. He met his lifelong friend and collaborator, Noble Sissle, the following year. The team of Blake and Sissle went on to write and perform such notable musical hits as "I'm Just Wild About Harry" and such successful Broadway shows as "Shuffle Along."

In this selection from an interview/performance conducted in 1970 for public television by musician Max Morath, Blake, recalls that he had to practice his rags on the family piano when his mother wasn't home. When she caught him playing a ragtime tune, she usually ordered him out the door with the stern warning: "Take that ragtime out of my house!"

Despite its origins in black urban culture, ragtime found an enormous audience among white Americans after the turn of the century, just as blues, rhythm and blues, soul, and rap music have done over the course of the twentieth century.