Macidol Mac music community

Song Information:

Johnson was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His family moved to New York City in 1908. His first professional engagement was at Coney Island in 1912. In 1911, while he was "still going to school in short pants", he attended Jelly Roll Morton's performance in Harlem and was inspired by the blues. Johnson and Morton represented different branches in the subsequent evolution of the ragtime of Scott Joplin, into the jazz piano of the teens and 1920's. History would prove that the Johnson school would eventually become the more influential one, as subsequent generations of jazz pianists, whether they be in the stride, swing, or bebop tradition, can trace their lineage back to James P. Johnson.

Scott Joplin, the pioneering ragtime pianist and composer, who had penned the first great hit of the genre ("Maple Leaf Rag"), and the first piece of popular sheet music to sell a million copies, had moved to New York in 1908. It was here that he died, broken, and nearly penniless, in 1917, frustrated by his unsuccessful attempts to have his last great compositional effort, the opera Treemonisha, performed. It was James P. Johnson, who grew up listening to, and playing the music of Scott Joplin, who was to become the man most responsible for the evolution of the ragtime piano of Joplin, into the earliest, and still most swinging form of piano jazz, which has become known today as Harlem Stride Piano. Joplin, in death, remained a significant influence on Johnson, who retained links to the ragtime era, by playing Joplin's rags, most notably "Maple Leaf", as well as the more modern (according to Johnson) and demanding, "Euphonic Sounds". Johnson had also been aware of Joplin's operatic efforts, as in his collection was found a copy of "A Real Slow Drag" from Treemonisha. This is of no small significance, as, in the 1930s, when Johnson was financially secure through the royalties from his compositions, he was able to pursue a lifelong ambition of writing orchestral works. In this endeavor, he was inspired by, and followed in the footsteps of other pioneers from the world of popular music and jazz, such as George Gershwin, and William Grant Still, both of whom he could count as colleagues.


Originally James P. Johnson made a piano roll of his performance of this piece. That roll was then made into a MIDI file recorded with tempo mapping and the Bosendorfer piano in Logic as read by the iMac as heard here. The first phonograph recording of this piece by Johnson was made in 1927.