Early Scottish Ragtime

Dr Vic Gammon recently retired from the International Centre for Music Studies at the Newcastle University, but is as busy as ever. He was intrigued by the fact that although ragtime emerged with Scott Joplin and Tom Turpin at the end of the 19th century, tunes with ragtime rhythms had been published, and played, in the UK as well as the US, since the 1840s. He found, too, ragtime's characteristic syncopation in some Scottish and English dance tunes dating from the 18th century – perhaps even earlier.

Gammon's academic work has always been driven by his love of music and song as, first and foremost, something to be played and sung. Not content with just writing an academic paper, he gathered some of these tunes and a group of high calibre musical friends to record them: Stewart Hardy (fiddle), Sandra Kerr (concertina), Steve Harrison (mouth organ), the wonderful Irish flautist Desi Wilkinson, and Dan Walsh, a terrific young banjo player. Hence this album, marvellously subtitled Proto-Ragtime and American Dance Tunes in Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

‘Bob Chadduck's Jig’ and ‘Oakland Garden’ clearly anticipate ragtime. I hear it too in ‘The Marquis of Carmarthen's Birthday’ and ‘The Collier's Daughter’, both 18th-century tunes. Gammon is not claiming ragtime originated in Scotland, though he says it is ‘not out of the question’ that these tunes ‘were a direct element in the emergence of ragtime.’ It certainly isn’t, but the most important point is that these are fine pieces – the whole album is a delight.