Analysis Of Scott Joplin 's ' Maple Leaf Rag '

Scott Joplin helped to shape music, in the past and in the present. Joplin’s works were composed with both classical and African-American techniques, which showed a new type of music the world had yet to see. Joplin helped to not only develop ragtime music, but also laid the foundation for the future of jazz music.

Released in 1971 and produced by Reprise records, river is an intensely emotional contemporary folk song about heartbreak. Written solely by Joni Mitchell for her album ‘Blue’ the song is reminiscent of Christmas time although lyrically it has little relationship to Christmas. (Hopper, 2012)

In Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection Native Guard, the reader is exposed to the story of Trethewey’s growing up in the southern United States and the tragedy which she encountered during her younger years, in addition to her experiences with prejudice and to issues surrounding prejudice within the society she is living in. Throughout this work, Trethewey often refers to graves and provides compelling imagery regarding the burial of the dead. Within Trethewey’s work, the recurring imagery surrounding graves evolves from the graves simply serving as a personal reminder of the past, to a statement on the collective memory of society and comments on how Trethewey is troubled with what society has forgotten as it signifies a willingness to overlook the dehumanization of a large group of people.

Joplin was in Chicago, he started a band and played cornet. After the fair was over he

Have you ever felt that you knew you your home but then realized that it actually wasn’t what you thought it really was? Well, that’s how Jacqueline Woodson felt. As we grow and change, so do our perspectives on a variety of things that we experience in life. In, When a Southern Town Broke a Heart, Woodson introduces ideas changing as you get older as a central idea of the story.

Count Basie, was born August 21, 1904 in Red Bank, New Jersey. He was a gifted pianist, bandleader, and composer. His mother was a pianist and his father was a mellophonist. His mother, not realizing that he would become an amazing pianist and bandleader, started off his journey by giving him his first piano lessons. Later on, William and his family moved to New York, where he was further influenced by James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. In New York, Waller taught Basie organ playing techniques. Further on in his life Count Basie had many top chart hits such as “One O’Clock Jump” and “Blue Skies” In the 1858 Grammy’s became the first African-American male represent of a Grammy Award. Throughout his career, he won many more. Not only was he a great composer and musician, but he was a good person who influenced many people's lives. This essay will outline the life of Count Basie and all of his

Billie’s Blues was recorded by American Jazz musician singer and songwriter Eleanora Fagan Gough professionally acknowledged as Billie Holiday in 1936 and released 1999. As a teen, Holiday started singing in clubs in Harlem. Holiday's creativeness of tunes to fit the desire was new. Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, Brazilian and Cuban musical influences could be heard in Jazz. It's what I think of as essential singing, something nature herself had brought together and made it well-organized to make the greatest human of cries. She had a worthy intellect of poetic content at her undeveloped age. Listening to her music Holiday had an inspiring impact on jazz music and modern singing when it comes to the Expression, Performing forces and Rhythm of her piece.

Originally named The Muleskinners, The Hamilton County Bluegrass band was founded by a group of university students in Auckland in 1962.[9] For the young members, their first encounter with bluegrass would be the theme song “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” from the television show The Beverly Hillbillies. The show was one of the few American shows airing on New Zealand television at the time. The Flatt and Scruggs theme tune and Scruggs style banjo influenced player Paul Trenwith, who said “that’s how I wanted to learn banjo, and we found out there was a whole music genre that went with that, so we chased that up.”[10] Television was one of the key ways that the bluegrass genre was and still is transmitted internationally. The dominance of

The book, The Spirituals and the Blues, by James H. Cone, illustrates how the slave spirituals and the blues reflected the struggle for black survival under the harsh reality of slavery and segregation. The spirituals are historical songs which speak out about the rupture of black lives in a religious sense, telling us about people in a land of bondage, and what they did to stay united and somehow fight back. The blues are somewhat different from in the spirituals in that they depict the secular aspect of black life during times of oppression and the capacity to survive. James H. Cone’s portrayal of how the spirituals and the blues aided blacks through times of hardship and adversity

His half brother Charles taught him the basics on guitar yet Johnson’s most influential teacher was the famous bluesman, Son House. Son House was a student of Charlie Patton, one of the first well known Delta Blues musicians. Son also had also learned quite a bit from a gentlemen referred to as Lemon, a name given to him for the fact that he had learned every Blind Lemon piece directly from the phonograph (Blind Lemon is was one of the first Mississippi Delta bluesmen). Son’s playing largely resembled

He was later discovered here by John Stark who eventually published his first composition know as the Maple Leaf Rag. He later moved to St. Louis where he had the opportunity to perform for the next five years. Furthermore, he later left for New York, where he developed his own opera in 1911. This opera, called Treemanisha, was the first and only ragtime opera, but unfortunately, it only lasted one show. This was the falling point of his career, and he never regained the popularity he once had at the beginning of his career. In the 1970’s, Joplin and his opera was rediscovered with the revival of ragtime.

Fiddlin’ John Carson was born in north Georgia on March 23, 1868. He is known as one of the first country fiddle players in the world. He started playing the fiddle as a young teen and used a fiddle from Ireland to learn. “With fiddling as a side-line, Carson made his living in a variety of jobs, working as a farmer, railroad worker, jockey, and moonshiner. After moving to Atlanta in 1900 to work in a textile mill, he found increased opportunities to entertain as a fiddler. A 1913 strike caused Carson to turn to fiddling and singing on the streets” (Daniel 1). Bob Taylor, governor of Tennessee at the time, gave John Carson his nickname “Fiddlin’ John Carson.” Carson was one of the first old-time fiddle players to be broadcasted over the

In the poem “America” penned by Claude McKay in 1921, the speaker explains that even though America seems to be sucking the life out of him, and hates him, he still loves the country as it plunges itself towards certain death. The 1920’s were a very exciting time but also full of struggles. The recent invention of the automobile and subsequent lack of paved roads are a good example of an excitement and struggle, these struggles and excitements could help us determine the meaning of McKay’s interpretation of America. He sites many examples and gives his thoughts about American society, like how it treats its citizens, how it acts, and its dismal future. So, what does this poem mean when you discuss the life of an average 1920’s American?

Up until the late 1900?s, the American populace on the whole had assumed a very optimistic view of American history. Glossing over disgraceful events, emphasizing the brighter points in our history, our culture has attempted to ignore the obvious fact that we have had, and still have, our fair share of problems. In Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow unabashedly exposes some of the worst aspects of American life in our more recent history. Doctorow doesn?t hold back anything, providing detailed examples of human cruelty and sacrifice, and the evolution of American society. While critiquing American society was not the sole purpose of his novel, Doctorow does expose and examine many issues that people tended to ignore like

My yard was full of all varieties of vegetation, but the most hated flora was the giant cottonwood tree that towered 100 feet away from the back of my house, and dandelions. The massive tree was lovely in my young eyes, but gave my mom the gift of extreme seasonal allergies. My father, being the type of husband that would bend over backwards for my mother, wanted to cut it down himself. He wanted to kill it. because that gosh darn tree hurt his beloved wife. With some negotiating my mom finally persuaded my dad to leave the job of cutting down the tree to the professionals. When the tree was finally fell it nearly spread across my whole yard width wise. The cottonwood became the common passage to cross my thorn ridden yard to get to the creek.