D. L. Bullock said:

> I have been unable to find any indication that ragtime originated
> from anyone other than Joplin.

Without wishing to argue the point about the form, there was at least
one Gottschalk piece from about 1890, where he was simulating a local
fair, which includes some bars of pure ragtime.  Also Cesar Franck,
the Belgian composer based in Paris, quotes some ragtime passages about
five years earlier.  If I was any good at this I would know the titles!

On the point about Jelly Roll Morton and early ragtime, I can remember
hearing in the 1940s, when there was a great craze in England for
everything traditional in jazz and many original performers came over,
that Morton's efforts in piano roll making were not confined to his
hand-played pieces, as he had edited a number of ragtime rolls for a
roll maker, possibly US, around 1910.  These would not have been to his
later style and it's unlikely he was credited with it, so we'll never
know for certain.

I have one Collector's Classics recut of "Jelly Roll Blues" which
claims to have originated in 1915, with no other information.  It's a
four-hand affair, somewhere halfway between one of those over-arranged
Tin Pan Alley ragtime horrors and Jelly Roll Morton himself stomping at
the keyboard.  I do wonder about it sometimes !

Dan Wilson, London