Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

Accounting firms are not widely regarded as sanctums for art and creativity. 

So as old Joe Lamb walked the halls of LF Dommerich & Company for the last time, on that day in 1957 when he finally retired after more than 40 years of service to the firm, his co-workers could be forgiven for not realizing they were bidding adieu to a great American artist.   To them, the droopy-jowled old man was just another cog in the great factoring machine that was Dommerich, a company that had served New York’s rag trade for decades.  But to musical historians, old Joe was much, much more than that.

Chances are, you’ve never heard of Joseph F. Lamb… that is, unless you are an aficionado of ragtime music.  Lamb is the composer who is routinely grouped with the more famous Scott Joplin and Joplin’s talented acolyte James Scott as the “Big Three” of ragtime, the musical genre that dominated popular music in the early 20th century.  Ragtime melded the melodicism of European classical music with the syncopation of early African-American music, and paved the way for the jazz and blues that would follow in subsequent decades.

Today, Joseph Lamb is considered a great American artist.  But for most of his life, he lived in obscurity, his name known only to a handful of scholars, many of whom believed it to be a pseudonym for Joplin. 

His greatest rags, like 1913’s “American Beauty Rag” and “The Top Liner Rag” which he wrote three years later, are celebrated for their multifarious textures, startling cadences and intricate harmonies.  Yet the man who gave the world such beautiful music never enjoyed formal training, having taught himself to play the piano after watching his sisters practice on the instrument.  He wrote his first rag at the age of 13, but remained a passionate amateur until 1906, when he submitted some of his work to New York music publisher John Stillwell Stark.  Although Stark rejected Lamb’s early efforts, a chance encounter between Lamb and Scott Joplin at Stark’s 23rd Street office led to Joplin — by then one of Stark’s best-selling composers — taking up the young composer’s cause.  After hearing Lamb play, Joplin told Stark he would affix his own name as arranger if the publisher would issue Lamb’s rags and, during the next 11 years, Stark published everything Lamb offered.

Eventually, however, ragtime became eclipsed by the genres of jazz and blues, and Lamb never fully cottoned to these newer forms’ improvisational styles.  Lamb joined LF Dommerich in 1914, and his last rag was published five years later.  Although he wrote a handful of novelty piano solos for Mills Music in the 1920s, they were never published and mostly destroyed when Mills moved its offices over a decade later.

Lamb lived just long enough to see his star ascend again.  After ragtime historians Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis tracked him down in his modest Brooklyn home in the late 1940s and included him in their groundbreaking book THEY ALL PLAYED RAGTIME, Lamb was increasingly sought out by ragtime buffs, and even played publicly again for the first time in half a century.  Although his name remains little-known today, Joseph F. Lamb’s place in history is secure, as a truly original composer of a uniquely American music.