Honey Moon Rag

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for solo piano.
• Who and whenpublished in 1916 by James Scott, an African American composer born in Missouri.
• What to listen forthe steady walk of the left hand, and the right hand jumping in between the beats.

Listen for

• The left hand's walklow notes and chords alternate in an even 'oom-pah', keeping the beat. This walk is the floor of ragtime.
• Syncopation in the right hand: the right hand deliberately plays across the beat. That pull against the beat is called syncopation. Listen for the moments when the hands seem out of step and the music feels even livelier for it.
• Several sectionsa classic rag is usually built from several sections of about sixteen bars each, which follow one another and repeat. Try to catch the moments when the mood shifts to something new.

When it was written

Ragtime is piano music that arose among African American musicians in the late nineteenth century. In an age before radio was common, people bought sheet music and played new songs on the piano at home, and ragtime spread from parlor to parlor that way.

By the mid-1910s, when this piece appeared, ragtime's popularity was slowly fading. In 1917 Scott Joplin, the composer most identified with ragtime, died, and in the same year the first jazz records came out and a new music began to draw attention. Honey Moon Rag belongs to the final stretch of the ragtime era.

The composer, James Scott

James Scott was born in Missouri around 1885. As a young man he worked at a music store in Carthage, Missouri, where his first pieces were published. Later he met the publisher John Stark, who brought many of his rags into the world. Today he is counted, with Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb, among the three leading composers of classic ragtime. After he later moved to Kansas City he taught piano and played in silent-film theaters, and he died in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1938.