Groovy.
  • Groovy.
For 99 cents at Value Village one night this week, I found an old record called Heliotrope Bouquet—a 1971 Nonesuch album of a bunch of old piano rags, dressed up in a lilac cover.

On this cover, there's a handful of painted purple flowers, each flower goofily wearing the face of a classic ragtime composer. There are six of them: Scott Joplin, James Scott, Tom Turpin, Louis Chauvin, the spectacularly named Charles Luckeyeth Roberts, and Joseph F. Lamb, the only white guy of the bunch, the definite minority in a black form of music that rose around the 1890s and that some say is like the earliest hip hop. Ragtime was the "first true upheaval" with "moral and economic consequences" in American popular culture, says Max Morath.

Below the bouquet on this graphically superlative cover are two hippie/dandy white guys sprawling in reclining-nude position but wearing their clothes: William Albright and William Bolcom.

I was drawn to the record for two reasons: rag and Bolcom.

Like plenty of kids of the '70s, I grew up hearing ragtime music, not because it was new but because it was enjoying a revival, a second-coming, which culminated in records like this one and the use of several of Joplin's rags, most famously "The Entertainer," in the 1973 Redford/Newman movie The Sting.

The first time around, rag was disreputable. Why was it called rag? One explanation has it that it was the music male performers played at brothels to entertain the customers on the days when the women, cycling together, were "on the rag." Maybe there's some truth to that, but ragtime was huge. It was popular music for a time. Joplin is only the best-known of the great ragtime writers. He made a one-cent royalty on every sale of the "Maple Leaf Rag" after it was published in 1899 in Sedalia, Missouri, considered one of the birthplaces of rag. Joplin wrote "high art" music, too. Devastatingly, Joplin's opera A Guest of Honor, about Booker T. Washington's dinner at President Roosevelt's White House in 1901 has been completely lost. His opera Treemonisha, about the adopted child of ex-slaves, was never performed in his lifetime.

Ragtime has become infected with nostalgia, but pull out those strains and the electricity of the music reveals itself right there in its DNA. Not all ragtime was played on piano, but piano rags are the easiest way to describe its structure: The left hand marches, the right hand fools around. Syncopation is what matters.

Bolcom, who plays all the rags on the 1971 record and who wrote two of them, caught my eye because he's a celebrated living composer and a "demon at the keyboard" who grew up in Seattle; he went to Everett High School and graduated in 1955. He was born in '38.

Check out this performance of a rag by Bolcom (not on Heliotrope Bouquet) that's worth your five minutes. If you're in a rush, for me it really takes off around 2:18; don't miss the knocking on the piano and the whistling—and go ahead and picture her in jeans, at a bar, hushing everybody by winning them over with the terrific music itself, rather than by the compulsory (and also highly American) force of unnecessary classical-concert-hall-uptightness.