Since its revivals in the early 1940s and, later, in the 1970s, ragtime has been mainly perceived as an instrumental genre, and more especially a pianistic one. This erroneous view has evolved little since then and, furthermore, has perhaps become narrower. Nowadays, for most people, including music historians, ragtime refers only to classical rags, mainly those of Scott Joplin, concealing the
... [Show full abstract] rich tradition of folk and popular rags, not to mention those of Jelly Roll Morton, which are wrongly considered as jazz pieces. The same applies to ragtime's vocal works, which have been totally excluded from the pianistic definition of this tradition. As understood today, the ragtime lacks many of its early features, which this article reconsiders: it was originally a plural and complex musical culture, both instrumental and vocal, variously designed for black or white audiences, which had a deep influence at a social and cultural level.