On the Pike

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for solo piano, in C major.
• Who and whenpublished in 1904 by James Scott, a composer from Missouri.
• What to listen fora left hand keeping the step and a right hand bouncing across the beat above it.

Listen for

• The oom-pah left handa low bass note and a chord in the middle of the keyboard take turns. Like marching feet, this steady beat is the floor the whole piece stands on.
• The off-beat right handwhen the weight falls between the strong beats, that is syncopation. While the left hand walks evenly, the right hand seems to skip slightly ahead.
• The moment a section changes: a classic rag usually strings together a few sections of around sixteen bars, each one repeated. Listen for a tune going by twice and then a new tune taking over.

When it was written

Ragtime is piano music that grew up among African American musicians in the late nineteenth century. Before radio and records were common, people bought new music as sheet music and played it themselves at home. Music stores kept a pianist on hand to play new pieces for customers.

James Scott was born around 1885 in Neosho, Missouri. He had little formal training and is said to have taught himself most of what he knew at the piano. In his late teens his family moved to Carthage, where he started out doing odd jobs in a music store and went on to demonstrating new sheet music. His first pieces were published in Carthage. On the Pike is one of his early works, from the years before he met the publisher John Stark.

James Scott

Around 1906, the story goes, Scott met Scott Joplin in St. Louis, and Joplin introduced him to Stark. From then on Stark published most of his music, and Grace and Beauty, published in 1909, made his name. Today he is counted with Joplin and Joseph Lamb as one of the big three of classic ragtime.

After ragtime gave way to jazz, Scott taught music in Kansas City and accompanied silent films in theaters. When sound films spread, that work dwindled, and he died in Kansas City in 1938.