Ragtime

Ragtime is a style of American popular music, composed chiefly for piano and published as sheet music between the mid-1890s and the late 1910s, whose defining feature is a highly syncopated melody played against a steady, march-like bass. Its classic form, multi-strain pieces with contrasting sections, as perfected by *Scott Joplin* in works such as "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899), combined African-American folk practice with European march and parlour traditions. Ragtime was the first African-American music to achieve nationwide commercial dominance in the United States, and it stands as a direct precursor of jazz.