My late friend Cliff Neiswanger used to tell me about the "good old
days" when he was a young ragtime piano player.

Cliff died about thirty years ago, and he was in his mid-eighties then,
so as a teenaged performer that would have been just about one hundred
years ago.  He played mostly in the Chicago/St. Louis "circuit", and he
said that he knew who Mr. Stark was, who was the one that supplied him
with some of his music.  Cliff was sight reader.

My impression from the conversations that I had with Cliff, who lived
almost directly across the street from me at the time, was that he
considered Mr. Stark to be the originator of the Ragtime Music as such.

It seems that many of the pianists of the time were "ragging up" the
music they were playing until someone actually put that style of music
in written form.

I recall that Cliff used the expression "raggedy music" now and then to
describe what we now call Ragtime.  That term was used because the
music was not "neat and orderly", as the higher class of people
preferred, but was just that to the ear: "Raggedy."

Unfortunately, I made very few notes of our conversations and those
meager few that I did make were destroyed when our house was burned
down in 1982.  Therefore, what I have now are only the memories.

But I do recall that Cliff seemed to regard Mr. Stark as the one
individual that started Ragtime as such, taking it from the "Raggedy"
music that was being played at the time.

Another thing that I always enjoyed was when Cliff would recall his
past experience in so-called "piano cuttings."  He would go to any
that he knew about and could reach, and he sometimes participated in
them, too.

It's too bad that age and infirmities catch up with us, so I never got
to hear Cliff perform on the piano, but he could still hum any Ragtime
tune I could name and a lot that I couldn't name.

He told me about one time that the great Scott Joplin came into a place
where he was playing and the place went wild, and so Cliff got off the
bench and let Joplin perform.

Believe it or not, Cliff told me he wasn't favorably impressed with
Joplin's playing.  Then he added that he supposed if anyone heard _him_
try to play now that they wouldn't be very impressed either.  Since
I've essentially lost the use of my hands I can totally understand
that.

The difference is that Cliff was in his eighties and I think Joplin
was probably in his thirties.  Thirty years ago I could still pound
out an impressive sound but now, closing in on seventy, it's a totally
different story.

Several years ago I saw Rudy Friml performing on the late night TV show
and in his nineties he was still amazing.  Some have it and some don't.

Hal Davis