Eubie Blake
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Eubie Blake (February 7, 1887 - February 12, 1983) was a popular pianist and composer. There is some controversy to his birth date.[needs proving] He gave his birth year as 1883 in the latter part of his life. However, recently released documents -- the 1900 United States census, his World War 1 draft card, his Social Security registration and his passport registration -- all list 1887 as his birth year. "Backdating" one's year of birth was quite common among musicians from that time (Jelly Roll Morton is another well known example of this). Blake also claimed to have composed his "Charleston Rag" in 1899, which would have made him 12 years old. There is no evidence he was composing at that age or at that time.[needs proving] Ragtime scholars believe this may be another case of "backdating".
[change] 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 the precursor to jazz music and no one played the ragtime piano any longer than Eubie Blake. Blake, a musician, composer, and performer born in Baltimore in 1887, 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.
