walking upstream…
Eubie Blake
photo: unknown author · public domain ↗Eubie Blake
sourcesThe Syncopated Times — "'One-Leg' Willie Joseph · The Syncopated Times — "Eubie Blake · Library of Congress — "The Eighty-Six Years of Eubie Blake" essay by Ken Bloom and Richard Carlin (1969 Columbia sessions; Jesse Pickett's "The Dream") · ragpiano.com — "James Hubert 'Eubie' Blake," Bill Edwards (documentary evidence for the disputed 1887 birth year)
On February 7, 1983, five days before he died, Eubie Blake celebrated a hundredth birthday his WWI draft card and 1920 passport contradict, placing his birth four years later, in 1887. Blake never budged on 1883, and this record doesn't resolve it for him. Born James Hubert Blake in Baltimore, the sole surviving child of ten born to former slaves, he learned ragtime in the city's saloons and bordellos over his mother's objections ("Take that ragtime out of my house!"), and later insisted a signature bass trick attributed to his New York rival Willie "The Lion" Smith wasn't Smith's at all: "He thinks I got it from him," Blake said. "I got it from One-Leg Willie." By 1921 he and lyricist Noble Sissle had written Shuffle Along, one of Broadway's first Black-produced musicals. Everything he needed, Blake said, he'd gotten in Baltimore before New York ever heard of him.
the sound in question
1969
Charleston RagEubie Blake
walk the tributaries ↓
One-Leg Willie Joseph1900s · Ragtime
Blake named one pianist, unprompted, across decades of interviews, as the best he'd ever heard: "One-Legged Willie Josephs, from Boston," he told American Heritage in 1976. "I don't see no difference in One-Legged Willie playing the piano, and Leopold Godowsky" — the era's reigning concert virtuoso. Boston Conservatory-trained and the only Black student in his class, Josephs won a blind contest against four white rivals outright, only to be told by the dean, "I can't give it to you and you understand why. If I do, I'll lose my job." He took second prize and turned from the concert stage to ragtime for good.
listen: upstream & heresource: American Heritage — "The 93 Years of Eubie Blake," Max Morath, Oct. 1976 (primary interview ↗
No known recording — Joseph's ragtime arrangement of SousaOne-Leg Willie Joseph
1969
Stars and Stripes ForeverEubie Blake
listen forJoseph never recorded — he died around 1908, embittered and addicted, leaving no trace of his playing beyond what Blake carried forward. Decades later Blake put the debt on record himself: "the only arrangement I ever copied from anybody was One-Leg Willie's 'Stars and Stripes Forever.' He did it in march time, ragtime, and '16" — the old term for boogie-woogie. Hear that literal transfer on Blake's 1969 Columbia recording: Sousa's stiff military march loosened into a rolling, syncopated left hand, the tune's tread turned into a walking, rocking bass exactly as Joseph is said to have played it decades earlier.
Jesse Pickett1890s · Ragtime
Blake was still a teenager working the sporting houses of Baltimore when he found his real classroom: Jesse Pickett, already an older man on the scene, played piano through the open window of a local bordello where young Blake could stand outside and study his hands. Pickett noticed the boy watching, talked to him, and encouraged him rather than chasing him off — an informal apprenticeship in a city with no conservatory open to a Black teenager. Decades later, producer John Hammond specifically asked Blake to record one of Pickett's own tunes for the 1969 sessions, naming it among the pieces that had shaped Blake's earliest style.
listen: upstream & heresource: Maryland Historical Society — "The Life of Eubie Blake" by Dr. Karl Koenig (Jesse Pickett and One-Leg Willie Joseph anecdotes) ↗
No known recording — Pickett's "The Dream"Jesse Pickett
1969
Dream RagEubie Blake
listen forPickett's tune never got a recording of its own — it survives only because Blake preserved it. Ragtime historians place "The Dream" among the oldest proto-ragtime pieces in circulation, built on a rolling, habanera-derived left-hand pattern rather than the stiff duple-march bass standard ragtime later settled into. On Blake's 1969 recording, listen for exactly that older figure: a left hand that rocks in loose, syncopated clusters instead of striding in even oom-pah beats, a bass pattern Blake believed predated the ragtime boom he later helped popularize.
Leslie Stuart1900s · Operetta / Musical theatre
Asked in 1976 what turned him from performer to composer, Blake didn't name a fellow pianist — he named a British theater composer he'd never met. "I wanted to write shows — like Leslie Stuart, the Floradora man," he said, naming the composer of the hit 1900 musical Floradora. "He was my inspiration. I would never have been a composer if it hadn't been for him. I never saw him in my life. He wrote beautiful music, you know, and I said, 'I can do that.'" It's the flattest debt Blake ever confessed to anyone — stronger, in the same breath, than his praise for Broadway's George M. Cohan.
listen: upstream & heresource: American Heritage — "The 93 Years of Eubie Blake," Max Morath, Oct. 1976 (primary interview ↗
1899
No known recording — "Tell Me, Pretty Maiden"Leslie Stuart
1921
Love Will Find a WayEubie Blake
listen forThere's no direct borrowing to point to here — Blake never covered or quoted a Stuart tune, and this pairing is stylistic, not a documented transfer. Stuart's "Tell Me, Pretty Maiden," from the 1899 Floradora score, is a close-harmony, waltzing romantic duet built for a paired chorus, the West End operetta sound Blake grew up admiring from across an ocean. Blake's own "Love Will Find a Way," from Shuffle Along two decades later, borrows that same polite duet form and slows a Broadway score down to match it — the clearest trace of the theatrical model Blake said made him a composer at all.