Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs”, and the Dark Parkway to Blues and Jazz Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff

Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs”, and the Dark Parkway to Blues and Jazz Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff

Ragged But Right takes its place in the Blues Hall of Fame alongside The Original Blues, the 2023 inductee by the meticulous research team of Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. In this 461-page volume the focus is on the pre-blues era when ragtime swept the country and helped bring recognition to Black performers despite the prejudices of the time. Drawing on coverage in the nationally distributed Black newspapers the Indianapolis Freeman and the Chicago Defender, augmented by reports in Billboard and Variety, the authors reconstruct the movements of minstrel shows such as

the Silas Green and Rabbit’s Foot troupes as well as various theatrical revues and tent shows. A popular vocal style of the time was known as “coon shouting,” a genre that at first starred white women performing songs that were “a cunning amalgam of appreciation and mockery.” The idiom grew to feature more Black performers and a change in the objectionable terminology and content, as the authors note: “As late as the mid-1910s the term ‘up-to-date coon shouter’ was routinely applied to the likes of Clara Smith, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, but around 1916 they were redefined as ‘blues singers.’”