THE NINE MUSES: PART 2

Matriarchy versus Patriarchy (23)

EUTERPE: MUSIC

Euterpe is a general Muse for Music and therefore the inspiration for Ragtime and Jazz. The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band – a group of New Orleans street urchins – is regarded as the first jazz band.With names like Warm Gravy, Haircut and Stalebread, and playing improvised instruments, there is something proto-punk about them. They first performed in the early 1900s, so this might explain why I haven’t been able to trace any recordings of them.

Ragtime, too, was street music, spreading through live performances in saloons and brothels.

Its importance to the British soldiers of the Great War is completely ignored by British historians, who seem to have no interest in the character of the young men sent to be mass-murdered by their country. Yet Ragtime was as important to them as the Doors or the Animals – We Gotta Get Out Of This Place – was for the Vietnam War soldiers.

Ragtime doesn’t just feature in the song Fred Karno’s Army, it’s also noted here:

He’s A Ragtime Soldier

He’s a ragtime soldier

Ragtime soldier

Early on parade every morning

Standing to attention with a rifle in his hand

He’s a ragtime soldier

As happy as the flowers in May

(I don’t think!)

And then there’s

The Ragtime Soldier Man released in 1912 and 1917. Irving Berlin wrote the lyrics and composed the music.

I got too near the enemy,
Kindly carry me back to old Virginia,
And when you get me there
Say a prayer for your ragtime soldier man.

If historians could be bothered to comment on the British rock and roll music of its day, they would probably dismiss it as brought over with James Europe in 1918 with his Harlem Hellfighters, but that’s not the case. The British were calling themselves Ragtime Soldiers far earlier in the war. The explanation is that sheet music would have carried the rebellious sound that parents hated across the Atlantic. There were pianos in many ordinary homes and certainly a piano in every pub, so a new song would have attracted as keen a young audience as Spotify would today. There would have been ‘hit parades’ of sheet music enthusiastically discussed by those kids in the trenches before they were massacred or maimed, thanks to the callous indifference of the generals.

It’s why I had to call my successor to Charley’s War Ragtime Soldier. A full length comic book edition illustrated by Gary Welsh and Phil Vaughan is due out at the end of this year, or the beginning of next year.

Because someone has to remember our forefathers as human beings and not patriotic cannon fodder.

TERPSICHORE : DANCE

Erik Satie’s ballet Parade with crazy futuristic Cubist costumes by Picasso was Dada-influenced and first performed in Paris in 1917 as Zeppelins flew overhead.

The Muse definitely inspired its artists with a strong anti-war flavour, although this tends to be downplayed by music aficionados more interested in its artistry than its message. Yet there are explosions, the ratatatat of machine-guns and maybe even the hiss of poison gas, alongside sounds of trains, sirens and typewriters. Well worth a listen!

Today’s art elite might soft-pedal its anti-war message, but the audience at the time didn’t. The premiere was met with a negative audience reaction, bordering on a riot at times. The production began drawing howls of protest, booing, hissing and outrage well before its conclusion. There were insults and whistles. One woman shouted “Opium smokers!” Others accused the troupe of being “dirty Germans” and “Bolsheviks.” At the ballet’s conclusion, fistfights broke out, and a woman apparently attacked one of the creators, Jean Cocteau with a hatpin. “I have heard the cries of a bayonet charge in Flanders,” he wrote later, in obvious appreciation of the uproar, “but it was nothing compared to what happened that night at the Châtelet.”

The finale includes "a rapid ragtime dance”. For the times it would have been seen as jaunty, jarring and even vulgar when contrasted with the smooth traditional Classical sounds of the ballet. That ‘common’ ragtime music must have come as a total shock to the audience.

If you consider how the State has reacted furiously to the anti-war themes of Kneecap, Bob Vylan and other performers at Glastonbury, it gives some idea of the impact Parade must have had at the time.

It seems we live in less tolerant times today than 1917, because the creators of Parade, those ‘dirty Germans’, were not cancelled like Bob Vylan, even though France was fighting at the time for its right to exist.

All demonstrate the power of music to change minds and the power of the Muse.

No wonder the State fears it.

ERATO: EROTICISM

• When Ragtime first became popular, critics, particularly those concerned about the music's influence on youth, viewed ragtime as provocative and morally questionable. It was new, subversive and sexy.

And it was hot!

Not least because it was associated with African American culture, which led to racist criticisms, with some viewing it as an "African American cultural invasion". And the lyrics sometimes included the threat of violence. As one song put it, any man “that tries to win this girl of mine . . . my razor’ll seal his doom.”

Doctors feared the music could cause heart palpitations and brain disorders. On December 3, 1910, the Daily Oklahoman reported an address to the students at Wesleyan College in Macon, GA by Dr. Dingley Brown, Director of Music. “‘Ragtime’ music is the greatest curse of our country and the most serious menace to the younger generation in our homes. It is debasing and instills a criminal tendency into minds.”

But it was its eroticism that the older generation really hated. The Grizzly Bear was a popular Ragtime dance and seen as ‘dirty dancing’ along with other ‘animal’ dances like The Turkey Trot and the Bunny Hug.

Such touchy-feely, naughty, naughty dances were banned. In New York, for instance, the Grizzly Bear, Turkey Trot and Bunny Hug were deemed inappropriate for "working girls on New York's East Side," the United Press reported on Sept. 28. "Dance hall proprietors who permit such dances will be arrested for disorderly conduct."

R.A. Adams, in his 1924 book The Social Dance, wrote: "The 'Boll Weevil Wiggle' and the 'Texas Tommy Wiggle' are danced in close personal contact intended to arouse sex feeling. The 'Grizzly Bear' encourages the closest and most violent physical contact for the same purpose. The 'Bunny Hug' is danced in imitation of the sex relation between male and female rabbits. The 'Turkey Trot, 'Fox Trot,' 'Horse Trot, 'Fish Walk,' 'Dog Walk,' 'Tiger Dance,' and the 'Buzzard Lope,' are all imitative of the lower animals in their sex life, sex desire, sex excitement and sex satisfaction; and these things are in the minds of the dancers who understand the meaning of the animal dances."

“All rag dances, such as the Duck Wobble, the Grizzly Bear, the Kangaroo Glide, the Angleworm Wiggle, and any such rag dances of an indecent nature at any public or private dance are subject to a forfeit into the police fund of the city treasury of from not less than $5 nor more than $50.”

They might well have chosen any of the other 195 or so “animal” ragtime dances published in this naughty era, including “The Baboon Bounce,” “The Blundering Buffalo,” “The Boiled Owl,” “The Lobster Glide,” “The Potato Bug Parade,” “The Possum Trot,” and “The Fresno Flea.”

Ragtime was decried as a threat to mental health. The Women’s council of Sacramento declared ragtime “tended towards evil.” Blue-nose organizations claimed that girls who danced ragtime would be motivated to work in brothels. And it wasn’t just words bandied about. On March 17, 1913, in Grants Pass, Oregon, club owner Ed Spence was stabbed 11 times after trying to enforce his “no animal dances allowed rule” upon a couple caught dancing ragtime.

And the topper? On January 20, 1913, Woodrow Wilson, afraid of a national scandal, cancelled his entire inaugural ball for fear that participants would dance ragtime.

They sound brilliant! All these ‘lewd’ dances, especially the Grizzly Bear, were condemned by the Vatican.

The "Grizzly Bear" dance was characterized by close physical contact and a "rough and clumsy" imitation of a bear's movements. Dancers would hug, whirl, and joggle, mimicking a bear's movements, often with exaggerated side-stepping and bending of the upper body. Then shouting "It's a Bear!".

What greater recommendation for the dances than the Vatican hating them?

No wonder our Tommies in the trenches called themselves the Ragtime Infantry! The music’s significance and importance to those kids now becomes a little clearer.

Our soldiers had little enough to smile about, as innocent cogs in the State’s mass-murder machine, but The Muse brought her eroticism to lighten their brief and tragic lives.