The Roots Of Ragtime Music

Ragtime Music is considered, in many minds, a primitive form of jazz. Others see it as a type of folk music, and others called it popular music during its time. Ragtime music was really all of these things and much more. Ragtime's roots encompasses every musical source in America, and extends way back  to the 1800s. Ragtime was Americas first, and most unique contribution to musical literature.
Although no one still living knows for sure the original meaning for the word ragtime, it is most often thought to have come from the phrase "ragged time'- meaning tearing time apart. A rag, strictly speaking, is a syncopated instrumental march. Ragtime is a much more eclectic term that can apply to almost any music that is syncopated. To rag a song is to play it in a syncopated style. Therefore, Ragtime music encompasses more than just instrumental rags, and should include more diverse musical forms like the rag song and Dixieland music.
Syncopation is the continuous superimposition of an irregular rhythm over top a regular rhythm. Although syncopation is essentially of African origin, its combination with the European musical system accounts for the uniqueness of Ragtime music. Ragtime is composed within the European written framework, and uses a notational system based on measures and divisions of measures. African music is polyrhythmic, and based on an entirely different frame of reference that gives at least as much emphasis to rhythmic parts as it does to melody and harmony. As a result, much of the African music contains very sophisticated and complex polyrhythmic patterns. Commonly called secondary rag, it often appears in ragtime as duple meter, coinciding with triple meter. Another important African musical element is the emphasis on the percussiveness of the music. This results in a great variety and subtlety of accents. The African influence is seen in the melodic and harmonic structures of Ragtime. Although based on the traditional European major and minor scales, much of Ragtime uses a preference for the pentatonic scale, which is more prevalent in African music.
The nature of early Afro-American music varied from locale to locale. Slaves were barred from performing their pure African music, which forced them to perform European music, improvised in the African style. Black musicians were transforming this material into new compositions, and developing new styles of playing in the process.
The large body of Afro-American music still came from slaves and was pure folk music, and evolved from their daily lives. Although slave work songs are generally considered to be primary sources for blues songs and not Ragtime, a case could be made that the vocal style of the work songs influenced all black music, including Ragtime. The melancholy emotional intensity can be detected in many of the rags. A number of Ragtime melodies can be traced to these types of vocal work songs, according to many of the old timers. The Ragtime era influenced the development of most of our popular music ever since.