Continued: Patricia Lamb Conn: Connecting with Ragtime's Glory Days

Pat, still irritated by the earlier curt response, planned to ignore the overture, but her grandmother interceded, saying "Write to him. He's lonesome, he's in the Army, he's away from home."

"So," Pat said, "we started corresponding, but I never saw him until he came back from Europe after the war. Then we started dating. We had a date almost every Friday night. He would meet me at work and it never failed -- it always rained. The girls at work always used to kid me, because if it was a rainy day they'd say, 'Pat must have a date tonight.'"

Bill had completed two years of college on the G.I. Bill when they married on September 6, 1948. Although they had planned that Pat would continue working until Bill's graduation, her pregnancy intervened. "We had two kids before he graduated. Looking back on this, you'd think, 'Why did we ever do that?' But it worked out okay because he managed to finish his schooling. There was a supermarket up the corner from where we lived, so he used to work there on Saturdays. We got by."

Pat and Bill would ultimately have three boys and three girls, the last born in 1958.

Pat well remembers that April day (probably in 1949) when musicologist and author Rudi Blesh came calling looking for her father. Blesh and Harriet Janis were researching their ground-breaking book They All Played Ragtime, to be published in 1950. After rejecting a prevalent theory that Joseph Lamb was a Joplin pseudonym, according to one account they had been guided to Brooklyn through an address on a copyright document in the Library of Congress and had found Lamb's name in the telephone book.

Said Pat, "They went to his house -- 2229 East 21st Street -- and rang the bell. A neighbor saw them and asked who they were looking for. When told, [the neighbor] said, 'He's not home, but his daughter lives up the block.' I lived across the street and up the block a way. It was afternoon, if I remember rightly. My kids, or most of them, were in school. He rang the bell. I opened the door, and I didn't know who this guy was. He says to me, 'Do you know Joe Lamb?'

"'I said, 'Yes, he's my father. Who are you?'

"He hollered out to Harriet, 'We found him, we found him!'

"Then he told me that they'd been looking for my father everywhere. and they couldn't find him anywhere. They had looked in the Midwest, and, I guess, almost everywhere they could think of. Then he was telling me they were going to write this book. I said to them, 'He's at work right now. I'm sure he'd be happy to see you when he comes home.'

"So, that's what they did. I didn't even invite them into the house, because I didn't know these people. He must have gone over to see my father that evening, I guess. I wasn't there."

Pat's visits to ragtime events started in the late 1970s with the annual "bashes" that the now-defunct Ragtime Society, based in Toronto, Ontario, used to hold. Her brother, Joe, and mother, Amelia, attended for many years.

"Joe kept saying to me, 'Pat, you don't know what you're missing. You should come.' But I said to him, 'Joe, how can I go? Who's going to mind my six kids while we go off for a weekend?'

"Eventually my mother's sister said to me, 'Oh, Patricia, if you really want to go, I'll mind the kids for you.' That's all we had to hear. We were out the door. We've been going to festivals ever since."

Pat's active participation in festival activities began when Galen Wilkes convinced her to present a seminar at a festival he sponsored in Niantic, Conn. "I'm not a public speaker. I never did anything like that before," she said. "The first one I did was in Connecticut. Galen Wilkes had put on a festival in 1993, and he asked me to do a seminar. Then I did one in Sedalia quite a while back [at the 1999 Scott Joplin festival, with Galen Wilkes]. Here in Columbia I did one [at the 2004 Blind Boone festival, with Kjell Waltman], and in Sacramento I did one [at the 2004 West Coast festival, with Tom Brier on piano and Pat's daughter, Kathleen, operating the projector].

"I've done all these things, but I still can't get used to it. I try to make my seminars so that people see my father not just as a composer, but just as an ordinary father..to show him as a person. You can't tell yourself if it comes across like that, so I asked a couple of people, and they told me, 'Yes, it did, and it was wonderful.' So, whatever I'm doing, I guess it's right."

Pat was tempted to draw the line, however, at the seminar in Columbia where the songs that her father had written for the church minstrel shows were to be performed. "When [pianist] Kjell Waltman told me, 'We're going to sing,' I replied, 'Kjell, I'm not going to sing. I'm not a singer.'

"He said, 'We're going to sing.' So, we sang the four songs. I thought, 'I don't know what I'm doing here.'

"People understand I'm not a good singer, but it's fun to do, because those were songs that we used to sing as kids and that my father would play after supper every night."

Pat illustrates her seminars with various items -- scripts, photos, and sheet music. She had found them stored among her father's effects, which she obtained after her mother's death. Her big finds were manuscripts of some of her father's previously unknown compositions, both songs and instrumentals. She remembers the manuscripts as being very neat, and she would occasionally run off copies by personal request. In 2002 she contacted Sue Keller, noted ragtime pianist and occasional music publisher, with the suggestion that they do a folio. "I can't hold onto these anymore," explained Pat. "They have to be out where people can hear them."

With the editorial assistance of composer Hal Isbitz, the result was a folio entitled A Little Lost Lamb. In 2005, with the folio about to be published, the Scott Joplin Festival dedicated its kickoff concert to Pat's father, Joseph Lamb. Among her father's rags and songs, played and sung by various performers, Pat interspersed the personal anecdotes that made it an event to be long remembered.

I'm sure that all ragtimers, especially those who have attended festivals, will join me in appreciating Patricia Conn for her friendliness and willingness to share her father with us. Pat, you're a real lamb!

February 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

P.O. Box 19068, Minneapolis, MN 55419.