December Features
An Interview with Terry Waldo
by David Reffkin
Occasionally I record conversations with our most experienced musicians and historians in the field of ragtime not for biographical study, but to place some of their collected research and wisdom into perspective. Such is the case in this interview with Terry Waldo. I've heard him play and speak many times, read his book, This Is Ragtime (1976, the year we first met), and spoken with him, on and off mike, countless times in various locations. Always active as a performer and innovator, Waldo lives in New York, but he applies his many talents and interests nationwide. Among his interests is the attempt to discover the first examples of traditional ragtime syncopation as it was used before the earliest known rags were composed and published. Also told here is the curious incident of Harry the canary. This assessment of ragtime and ragtimers took place in the summer of 2008 and was recorded for my program, "The Ragtime Machine," on KUSF-FM, San Francisco, Calif.
• • •
David Reffkin: Since you've watched the ragtime scene develop over several decades, and studied the music's history, what are your observations about the revival's evolution?
Terry Waldo: There are many new players, including young ones who are very sharp. I have a feeling we're not getting a lot of the same kind of wild folks that we used to have. I remember the earlier years of festivals when there was an effort to have more of an emphasis on performance; in other words, entertainers instead of just piano players. When I think about the characters I used to see at these things, like Dick Wellstood, and Eubie Blake, and all the historians, I don't feel like I'm meeting them there. They all created things in different ways, which is the way I approach ragtime. I like ragtime and Spike Jones, for example, and when I make records and shows I like to cram in instrumentals and vocals, surprises and variety.
DR: I remember when the "famous" people in this music were first meeting each other at these things for the first time, and we'd all be sitting around discussing the finer points of ragtime history, Joplin, and analysis of the music and artifacts in detail. Now the discussions are usually about the current scene and the players.
TW: And at dances, there used to be a bunch of old people who knew how to do the cakewalks. They had the costumes, and doing steps that you never see. I hope somebody made films of it.
DR: The seminars are a good example of immense progress in the research and discussion that we now have. You might now hear something like "Accordion Ragtime in Omaha from 1963 to 1964." In the 1970s, we had panel discussions to define the word ragtime, and we'd talk about that for an hour. And, of course, Rudi Blesh was a part of that.
TW: Well, it's still a good topic. I went up to Rudi Blesh's house in New Hampshire and spent a long time with him. He was a very interesting character.
DR: The thing about all the young kids now showing up is that they haven't learned all the past history.
TW: And they don't know show business. We're not teaching that. You know, Eubie was a showman, and so was Bob Darch. If you heard Eubie do a show, he would do a showpiece, then a classical piece and turn it into ragtime, a Bert Williams tune, and he'd talk to the audience. That all goes with it. This music was part of show business. Jelly Roll Morton was in vaudeville, Joplin wrote for opera, and he was in a vocal quartet. They had that sense about it, and I consider that part of the discipline of it. All those Joplin rags weren't meant to be played one right after another.
DR: Do you have any large definitive statements about the rediscovery of ragtime and how it's all turned out?
TW: My book, This Is Ragtime, is being republished by Jazz At Lincoln Center, and it will be a new edition. It came out in 1976, and it was in paperback for a long time. I'll add a new chapter to it and I'll have to deal with the questions that you're asking right now, like where is ragtime now and what's happened and so forth. I think what I'm seeing is a lot of kids who are playing great, and some of them can play technically well things that took me forever to learn, if I could even play them at all. But there is no place for them to play. When I came up, I had connections with the older jazz people. I was able to put a band together that worked from time to time, the Gutbucket Syncopators. The Salty Dogs were still around, and the St. Louis Ragtimers were playing.
DR: And The Black Eagles.
TW: Right, I used to work with them. And they had a regular place, The Sticky Wicket. I played at Shakey's Pizza Parlor when I first got out of high school and into college. You could work in those places.
DR: Just think about that. You were playing in a small restaurant. These days in a place like that, the customers would all have laptops and phones, and live music would not be very effective or even desirable.
TW: Yeah, and there was the Red Garter in San Francisco, banjo places. There were places in my hometown, Columbus, Ohio. And I worked at a lot of different places. I had a partner, Susan LaMarche, who used to sing ragtime songs and stuff like that. We worked rock clubs. You could be in the same places that had rock bands the next night. We were like a contemporary group. I don't think as many people know about ragtime and traditional jazz. It's hard to get it in any of it the media, for one thing. And it doesn't fit comfortably into any niche of the recording business. I've heard the same things about jazz. I have had some contact with Wynton Marsalis and spent a little time with him. I play for Jazz At Lincoln Center every once in a while. I'm going to be teaching a course in ragtime there, coming up in the spring of 2009, over a two-month period on Wednesdays. Marcus Roberts is trying to set up some stuff for us to do, also.
DR: Now there's a contrast in styles!
TW: Well, we did a concert in Savannah, Georgia, where we were booked on the same program, and he heard me for the first time and liked it. His feeling is he doesn't play authentically, and he'll be the first to admit it. He doesn't really get into stride piano or Jelly Roll Morton, although he'll record these things in his own jazz style. But he's really interested in it. He wants to do something and get into the roots of it. I was told that when I was playing "Maple Leaf Rag," Marcus said "Holy (cow), listen to that." I had been kind of wanting to get to him, anyway, because he's been able to get some attention. Anyway, Marcus was connected with Wynton Marsalis. And that's what people think of jazz now. There's Wynton and there's everybody else. There are all of these kids coming up who play jazz. They're great players, and Wynton feels we need to create an audience for them. There are no places to play and no way to make money.
DR: What was your first contact with ragtime?
TW: My first connection to any of this music was through the recordings, I think. And then I sought out people who were playing it, and they were still around. I could find Turk Murphy, Eubie Blake and Dick Wellstood. I went down to New Orleans when I was 20 years old. And you could play with these guys. I was working gigs out in San Francisco with Pops Foster, and there was still some connection to the music.
DR: Max Morath is someone who has also continued to make the music using theater and other approaches.
TW: And Bob Darch was the guy that got him interested. He was the Johnny Appleseed of ragtime, planting seeds all over the world.
DR: Some people in Europe were very helpful in finding rare sheets and documents, and bringing them here to show us that the music spread far and wide.
TW: I have lost some of my interest in digging up obscure rags. To me, the interesting part of the research was the personalities and the sociological stuff that was involved with it, the soul of the music. Coming up with a rare sheet, apart from the musicality of it, has never done it for me.
December 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
P.O. Box 19068, Minneapolis, MN 55419.