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256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
Northern Negro pre-jazz music was almost like the picture within a picture within a picture. . . Ragtime was a Negro music, resulting from the Negro's appropriation of white piano techniques used in show music. Popularized ragtime, which flooded the country with songsheets in the first decades of [the 20th] century, was a dilution of the Negro style. And finally, the show and 'society' music the Negroes in the pre-blues North made was a kind of bouncy, essentially vapid appropriation of the popularized imitations of Negro imitations of white minstrel music which, as I mentioned earlier, came from white parodies of Negro life and music. . . . The hopelessly interwoven fabric of American life where blacks and whites pass so quickly as to become only grays!