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Article: The rag trader.(influence of Irving Berlin on ragtime music)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- U.S. News & World Report
- Article date:
- July 8, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It wasn't music--it was a "disease," an African-American rhythm that originated in the Midwest and grew ripe in the dance halls of New Orleans. Ragtime made "respectable" folks nervous, even as it drove America's youth to frenzied, full-contact dance. In the final years of the Gilded Age, the world was changing too fast for many. "Modernism had been coming along in terms of urbanization and industrialism, but it hadn't really registered so completely on people," says Philip Furia, author of Irving Berlin: A Life in Song. "People were still essentially living, at the end of 1910, in an 18th-century world."
Then came Irving Berlin, who made ragtime--and everything ...