My maternal grandmother was born in 1883 in a rural community.
She married and moved to San Francisco in 1907 just after the big
earthquake.  My grandfather was serving a tour in the US Army.  His
work required him to be away for days at a time.  To keep his wife from
getting bored he bought a delicatessen which she ran during the day.

There were two "dance halls" adjacent to their property.  At night she
could hear the music and the "screaming" coming from the dance halls.
The screaming frightened her but the music was very captivating.  She
had training as a classical violinist but wanted to learn more about
the dance hall music.

She bought a piano and made a deal with the dance hall pianist to teach
her how to play this "ragged time" music.  In return for a daily deli
lunch he taught her to play what we now call ragtime.

She learned a restrictive set of rules for syncopation of 16 bar
phrases which were always organized in an AA BB A CC DD format.  She
learned that ragtime was derived from the then very popular march
music form.  She played about ten early rags, but most of all enjoyed
adapting popular music themes into the "ragged time" format using the
rules she had learned from the dance hall pianist.  She never used the
word "ragtime".  To her it was always "ragged time".

I had always assumed from this experience that "ragtime" was a con-
traction of "ragged time" which in turn referred to the use of an
irregular syncopated melodic line.  Each rag required a memory for
four 16-bar musical phrases, but the rag format allowed the musician
to play 144 bars of music.  The listener never objected to the
repetition because the syncopation was unexpected to musical ears
expecting a march.

Anyway, this what my grandmother taught me about ragtime and its
origins.  She would be pleased to know that I'm passing this on to you.

Bill Finch

 [ You will enjoy a nice book published only a few months ago, titled
 [ "The Barbary Coast," containing recollections by the musicians
 [ who performed along that noisy strip in downtown San Francisco
 [ before WW1.  The compiler makes the point that California _also_
 [ contributed to the development of jazz, due largely to the black
 [ musicians traveling back and forth across the USA.  I'll try to
 [ locate the publisher.  -- Robbie