Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Mr. Krell's Second Job

The story starts, as many of these do, with an online auction:


The first thing you notice about this one is its unusual triangular shape:


To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 2, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.



2 comments:

Vance said...

While I defer entirely to your assessment of pencil history, your music history is a little bit off. Krell was definitely not the originator of ragtime. Scott Joplin's earliest published rags (which, to be fair, were called marches until Maple Leaf in 1899) date from the mid-1890s, and there were other works of that nature published around then as well. The music itself dates back earlier, to live performances in the less reputable hospitality institutions of New Orleans and St. Louis.

Jon Veley said...

Hi Vance and thanks for the comment,

From what I understand, Krell's Mississippi Rag was published in 1897, a couple years before Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag was published in 1899.

Like you mentioned, ragtime grew out of the march format. While I've seen some references to Joplin publishing music earlier than 1897, I didn't find anything that was called a "rag."

There's probably no bright line that would establish the date that the ragtime form was "born." However, from my limited research, it looks like the wild popularity of Krell's Mississippi Rag was the first time a rag had gone the equivalent of Victorian-viral.