Cut off at the roots
Columbia Tribune
Mary T. NguyenWhen Columbia audiences line up for the Original "Blind" Boone Ragtime and Early Jazz Festival, the event, which has its roots in black culture, seems unable to attract large numbers of young or minority audience members. This year, the event brings to town only one black performing artist.
America struggled through the late 1800s as it began to reconstruct and reunite itself as a nation. Populations legally free sought social acceptance and security. Particularly in the South, hate and resentment ran high, and lynching was used to express deeply held grudges.
Despite the strife and divide felt between whites and blacks, America bred a number of pioneers who would shape its culture in leaps and bounds while transcending color barriers.
Music especially united people, and by the 1890s, artists including native Missourians John William “Blind” Boone and Scott Joplin laid the foundation of American music with a style completely new for the time known as ragtime.
“These folks were extraordinary,” said Lucille Salerno, founder of the Original “Blind” Boone Ragtime and Early Jazz Festival. “They had to be to come to the top in a society that really didn’t want to know they were alive or their talent was so superior.”
For more than a decade, Salerno has organized the annual ragtime festival as a celebration of the heritage and history of ragtime, a dance music known for marrying the multi-rhythmic beats of African music culture with European folk and classical pieces.
“What this festival does, it keeps them alive,” Salerno said. “This is music that is more than 100 years old, and it’s kicking it. It’s still bringing, still attracting, still making people love it.”
Although ragtime continues to draw in audiences, what seems apparent within the ragtime communities is a lack of diversity and representation from the black community both in attendance and in performers. Although Salerno’s festival includes a host of performers from across the globe, only one of the performers — composer and performer Reginald Robinson — is not white.
“It would be very discouraging to go and see one black artist in a genre that emanates from the black community,” said Nathan Stephens, director of the Gaines-Oldham Black Culture Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “You would think that with that history, black artists would kind of have a better handle on the art, and you’d want artists who have roots and history in that art to utilize.”
Stephens said as an administrator, he can understand the limits Salerno and other organizers face in terms of economics when planning large events. But he’s unsure whether enough of an effort was made to contact a variety of artists, taking advantage of the resources in the jazz-rich community of Kansas City or the number of job-seeking performers in New Orleans.
“I would just want to know if all bases were covered to try to bring about an equitable presentation of artists,” he said.
Salerno’s attempt at audience outreach into Columbia and Mid-Missouri’s youth and black communities has included distributing free tickets to administrators with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department as well as trying to include members of different communities in the planning process.
Salerno said getting help from members of the black community isn’t a problem; it’s getting them interested in the music and staying for the concerts that is difficult.
She attributes the low interest to ragtime’s place in a historical context. Despite it being a swinging, dance music, she said, ragtime was created in front of a backdrop of persecution, defeat and repression.
Michael Budds, music historian at MU, said music has long been an outlet for the black community to establish a sense of identity in America, with an early example of sacred and work songs. With ragtime especially, he said, the combination of African and European musical traditions resulted in something so exotic and compelling that it quickly became mainstreamed. When that happens, however, art loses its ability to identify, and black artists feel obligated to renovate or reinvent the art over and over again.
“So usually black musicians have not looked back to try and conserve earlier identities because those identities have been compromised,” Budds said. “Mainstream society, however, has a longstanding tradition for conserving. It is partly a big nostalgic trip.”
Moreover, the disconnect between ragtime and today’s youths becomes more vast in the array of contemporary black and urban music with which today’s youths more closely identify.
The disconnect has nothing to do with malice or exploitation, Budds said. Instead, “it’s just part of a cultural process. I don’t think the lack of black participation is evident of white power or white exclusion. It’s just part of this phenomenon that has gone on in American society.”
Stephens said organizers can only do so much in terms of outreach and recruitment within target audiences. Outside of labels of age, class and color, sometimes it just comes down to taste.
“You can’t make something be appealing to someone when it’s not,” he said. “But why is it not appealing? That’s a question only the youths can answer. Sometimes youths are into what youths are into, and that’s not the fault of the folks who organize this event or the parents or someone else. They’re into hip-hop, R&B, gospel — they’re into whatever it is they’re into that keeps them disinterested in jazz and ragtime.”
Stephens and Budds both said education and exposure are the only ways to rebuild the bridge between new audiences of all backgrounds to ragtime. Stephens said it would be beneficial for young audiences especially to be able to understand how modern artists have taken foundational components of ragtime and expounded upon them to create contemporary music forms.
“It has to do with cultivating an appreciation of the past. Someone can’t love something they don’t know,” Budds said. “Most people don’t seek out music experiences that they’re not already familiar with. That’s a human nature problem, not a race problem or a class problem.”
Extracting its place in American history alone and understanding its greater impact on music history, Salerno hopes the festival continues to grow in attendance and notoriety so that the music’s provenance becomes more widely known and understood.
“This is the first, true American music,” she said. “Where did it come from? Blacks took their culture and the culture they found and put it together and created the first American music. Everything, every American genre and subgenre thereafter, is standing on the shoulders of this multiple rhythm format. There should be pride in that. There should be a sense of something really significant and beautiful that was created and given to the history of music.”
