Ragtime has never died, my friend; it still exists, and has influenced many later forms of music. Ragtime is like your great-great-grandfather, whose heyday may have been a century ago, but whose genetic heritage graces hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people today.

Scott Joplin, the ambitious young musician who wrote the world’s finest rags and elevated the genre to classical levels. His best-known pieces are Maple Leaf Rag (1899) and The Entertainer (1902).

Ragtime was the immediate predecessor to jazz, which inherited many of its characteristics, and elements of it remain in many other genres. Ragtime itself has periodic revivals and apparently will never be forgotten - just rediscovered, over and over again.

Ragtime, in its fairly fixed structure, is considered to have developed from the march music popularised by John Phillip Sousa, who composed and toured between 1880 and 1931. The march was transformed by the addition of African-American polyrhythms, whose syncopated chop led to the name “ragtime.”

This new musical form was embraced by one particularly visionary composer, Scott Joplin, who became its superstar with his 1899 monster hit, “Maple Leaf Rag.” Joplin wrote and published over 40 rags in his short lifetime.

Scott Joplin plays “Maple Leaf Rag,” captured on a piano roll before the advent of recording technology. How fascinating to hear the master’s own fingers playing his masterpiece! And - dare I say - to hear him “jazz it up” a bit? Foreshadowing of a newer, more evolved kind of ‘improvisational ragtime’ known as jazz?

Joplin was a brilliant musician and a fast learner, and despite being a young black man playing piano in the bawdy houses around St. Louis, he dreamt of being a classical pianist. He took the music of the bar and the cathouse and, in the course of educating himself in classical forms, elevated his own music - and with it, the genre - beyond its beginnings.

Along with Joplin, a few other skillful composers, notably James Scott, Joseph Lamb, Eubie Blake, and Jelly Roll Morton, brought high quality rags to the American public and took the music through its brief but brilliant heyday.

I was privileged to hear Eubie Blake (1887–1983) play in 1979, as he celebrated his 96th birthday at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Morris Mechanic Theater. I was a student at Johns Hopkins University and had taken up piano as a 14-year-old following my first exposure to ragtime through the movie “The Sting.” It was the experience of a lifetime.

A typical rag featured a syncopated melody played with the right hand, while the left hand played what is known as a stride bass. The player would play an oom-pah sound, first hitting a single note, usually the first note of the chord. Then he would move his hand to the right and play the full chord - perhaps playing 1–3–5 with his first, third, and fifth fingers; then he would slide his hand back left and pluck a lower note again (this time most likely a fifth); then back to a full chord again.

A simple stride bass played entirely with the left hand, stylistically the foundation of a rag. Just add a cheery syncopated melody in the treble range and you’re there! At least until more exotic and interesting jazz chords began to rear their compex heads, leading to the evolution of ragtime into jazz.

The music I described above - syncopated melody over a stride bass - would be sufficient to write what was called a “strain,” eight measures long, and played through twice. The rag would commonly consist of four strains, each repeated, with a restatement of the first strain to wrap up the song.

“The Entertainer” was a phenomenon all over again with the release of the movie “The Sting,” prompting Joplin to become a household name, if indeed he had ever ceased to be one. As excellent as the composition is, it is only one of many outstanding rags Joplin wrote. Tragically, one of his most ambitious works, a ragtime opera he called “The Guest of Honor,” was lost; no known copies exist today.

We can describe this common structure as AABBCCDDAA. (There were other variations in number of strains, number of repetitions, and so on.)

The strains might relate musically to one another, or they might be entirely different. I have read musicologists who have described the works of Joplin as beautifully developed, and others who claim that unlike classical music, there was no melodic development at all in ragtime.

At times, I roll my Plebeian eyes when listening to some classical piece in which the composer leads with a mildly interesting theme, then churns out a predictable wave of variations, first in a higher or lower register, then in a minor key, then on piccolo and triangle, and otherwise mashes it like potatoes so that it may be considered to have been “developed.”

This kind of pro forma set of variations is much of what gives classical music its tuxedo, but I find it also makes much of classical music a dim sum experience that limits its appeal; it is not, in my view, a suitable criterion by which to critique other genres, including ragtime.

In the later years of ragtime, some performers became bored with the strictures imposed by the form. Styles known as stride piano and novelty piano took ragtime in new directions even as jazz was gaining steam. The explosion of jazz on the scene almost feels like a reaction to the formalism of classic ragtime; there was more energy and more possibilities in ragtime than could be contained in a modified march structure.

Joplin himself, as he matured as a musician, had begun to introduce chords outside the familiar domain of what one might have heard on a banjo. He added codas, some of them incredibly impactful as in his final published tune, Magnetic Rag (1914), and otherwise brought in sophisticated elements that stretched the form to its limits.

In its day, ragtime was often played at blazing speed to show off the player’s virtuosity, resulting in an inappropriate setting of the tune. Joshua Rifkin recorded many of Joplin’s rags, playing them at a pace respectful of Joplin’s admonition on every piece of sheet music that ragtime should never be played fast. “Magnetic Rag,” composed as a still-young Joplin’s health was failing, may be the most complex and gravid piece he ever released; it was his last published rag and in that light, the brief, tender coda at the end may well have been his farewell to music. He died in 1917 of syphilis.

In addition, the medium influenced the message, to paraphrase McLuhan. And eventually changes in the media favoured new kinds of music.

In its day, ragtime was sold as sheet music and piano rolls; it was the kind of music played in homes and bars, usually on pianos, and was not typically associated with concerts and live performance.

Ragtime is considered to have reached Europe at the Paris Exposition of 1900, and soon entered the classical genre through the works of such luminaries as Antonin Dvorak, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky. Joplin’s dream of bringing ragtime to the classic stage was realised, although he did not live to see it. As one musicologist put it,

Ragtime – with Joplin's work at the forefront – has been cited as an American equivalent of the minuets of Mozart, the mazurkas of Chopin, or the waltzes of Brahms.

Ragtime, in its day, was like a child’s favourite sweater, and Scott Joplin was the boy who showed it off all winter and got all his friends hooked on similar sweaters. But as he and they grew up, the sweaters gave way to varied and tasteful wardrobes.

But to extend the analogy, the spirit of that original sweater influenced the entire concept of wardrobes from then on, right up to today. The entire suite of wardrobes may be viewed as variations on that original theme. Either way, ragtime was destined to become a classic.

And the classic has periodic revivals. It made comebacks in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and another in the 1970’s, thanks to performers like Joshua Rifkin and Marvin Hamlisch, whose version of “The Entertainer,” performed for the movie “The Sting,” was a top-three hit in 1974.

My favourite modern rag is “Root Beer Rag,” a composition of the Piano Man himself, Billy Joel. He continues to perform it at events, including the 2013 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.