ABSTRACT
E Arly Ragtime was an underground activity, with no show business infrastructure to support it. Each player acted as his own booking agent, manager, and publicist, going from saloon to saloon, house to house, city to city—wherever the grapevine said there was work. The first ragtimers peddled a single commodity: hot playing. They had to be good enough to beat out the competition for jobs and entertaining enough to hold jobs once they had them. Every player had a repertoire of tricks (always including a few borrowed from others) to command attention in noisy rooms. Professional survival depended on the material chosen and the assortment of pianistic devices used to put it over.
