Ragtime Pianist Shows Public TV How to Have Fun
By DAVID STEWART
n the summer of 1959 an itinerant musician and sometimes TV producer, Max Morath '48, was playing piano for melodramas in the restored town of Cripple Creek, Colo. A year later the 33-year-old graduate of Colorado College had written and performed a 12-part TV series that would change noncommercial television forever.
Over the next five years - while the music rights were held by National Educational Television (NET) - "The Ragtime Era" became the most watched noncommercial series up to that time, run and rerun constantly by all the educational (and many commercial) stations throughout the country. The series and its more expansive 15-part sequel, "The Turn of the Century," established Max Morath as a leading authority on ragtime as well as a popular performer.
It seems almost quaint to report that there was a time when public TV was uncertain whether it should seek to entertain or enlarge its audience. The problem in the late 1950s was how to take the first decisive step, to produce a popular series without compromising quality, to retain an educational message in an entertaining context.
The stations were at the brink of having a network. NET had arranged a Ford Foundation grant that purchased a video machine - then a very new devise - for each of the 50 or so educational stations in the country. Soon thereafter, John F. "Jack" White, NET's energetic president, visited every station looking for new program ideas.
"NET was thirsting for something different that was not the heavy arts and humanities thing," says Jim Case, the first program manager at KRMA, Denver. He helped create the ragtime series and directed all of its programs. "They wanted something a little lighter. So I invited Marvin Hall, a KRMA producer, and Morath to make a pilot."
"It was Hall's idea," says Case. "He knew that Morath understood the history of the period (1890-1920), its popular music, and how to play it. Hall's job was to help Max make the transition from performer to narrator, from pianist to historian. Our working title was "Before Jazz."
"The educators were using TV as a verbal medium," says Hall. "I thought we should be using visual and dramatic means, performers not teachers, to get the material across. NET needed a person who knew the history of his work, someone who could really connect with an audience. So I said to Max , 'Let's try it. They'll pay you!'"
"So," Case continues, "we raided several antique shops, put some ferns on the set and pushed tacks into the piano pads to give it that rinky-tink sound. Max, dressed in his '90s costume, played and sang for 15 minutes while we rolled the video. I sent the pilot off to New York and back came a contract for 12 half-hour shows."
The series describes a wide range of popular music, most of the hits and a lot of misses. Along the way, Morath talks about music for silent films, sheet publication, the emergence of the gramophone, barbershop singing, Tin Pan Alley and composers like George M. Cohan and Scott Joplin, among many others. He made clear, however, that his love was ragtime, a musical form that defined the period and influenced most of the popular music that followed.
An awareness of the venturesome nature of the series, its entertainment value, may have encouraged Morath and Hall to pack the programs with information. NET's publicity department also seemed sensitive about this series in which "show" clearly dominated "tell"; its initial press release begins, "A series of 12 unique educational and cultural programs...."
As Morath explains, "NET wanted to get away from the professor in front of the gray drape, but not too far away. It's worth a reminder in those days all NET programs had to have some sort of educational cachet. There was a consultant from the Colorado College music department built into our budget." (No one remembers seeing the consultant.)
In his history of public television, "The Vanishing Vision," former NET president James Day recalls, "NET needed to reach beyond the converted to find a new audience whose appetite did not necessarily tend toward the taste of high culture. "Ragtime Era" was everything educational television was not supposed to be - upbeat, fun and entertaining."
As Case remembers it, the production schedule was exceptionally rigorous, making demands that he enjoyed: "We all came in about 8 a.m. The design and scenic artists, two brilliant people, had been up all night preparing the set (they sometimes painted Oriental rugs on the floor). The station went live at 11:45 a.m., so we had to be out by then. Max had written and memorized the script. There were no cue cards or teleprompters. We walked it through, had a rough camera rehearsal (there was singing and dancing nearly every show). Then we would do it, from beginning to end with no stops.
"By the time we were three or four programs into the series we began to get this wonderful reaction from NET. It was what they wanted. It looked like commercial TV."
Looking at the programs today, nearly 40 years later, the viewer is struck by two characteristics - the extraordinary amount of information in each program and the intensity Morath brings to his work. In episode No. 2, "Any Rag Today?," we are ushered into a posh "sporting house" by a tall young woman in a feather boa and a slinky, sequined dress. Here we find Morath playing upright piano with its front removed. He is in his customary chalk-striped trousers, a shirt with sleeve garters, string tie, fancy vest with gold watch chain, a derby perched rakishly on his close-cropped hair, and a cigar clamped between his teeth.
"Scott Joplin should be better known today," he begins, launching into "Maple Leaf Rag," the first of six numbers in the half hour. Between these performances we learn about Joplin and several other rag composers, hear an explanation of syncopation ("Ragtime's key ingredient"), listen to some Tom Turpin rags on a piano roll - while Morath puffs reflectively on his stogie - before he shows us the door as the credits roll. In the episode concerning George M. Cohan, Morath manages to sing and play seven of the composer's songs while throwing in a seemingly off-hand story of Cohan's life and times.
"Morath could go through the camera," says Case. "It was his presence that gave the programs their authority. People believed him. In his narrative he cut right through the center of everything. He used straightforward evocative language that was easy to understand. He was that way in private conversation, too. There were no temperamental problems, no 'motivate me' or 'I don't feel right doing that.' None of that crap. We never had an argument."
For his work as writer/performer, Morath was paid $225 per show. Hall, the producer, made $100 and Case earned $125 as director. The studio crew, collectively, was paid $240. NET's total budget for the 12 programs was $22,000.
Time, Newsweek and other national publications featured the programs. Jack Gould, dean of America's TV reviewers in the early '60s, wrote in the New York Times that "[KRMA] could teach Madison Avenue a thing or two ... when Morath sat down to illustrate rag piano, his zest and craftsmanship asserted themselves informatively and entertainingly."
In Denver, where initial support for a new educational TV station had been tepid and sometimes hostile in 1956, the Denver Post now praised the series spontaneity, calling Morath, "a ragtime Leonard Bernstein." "He does more than just talk about ragtime on television. He sells it," asserts the Post, which went on to observe: "In an affluent society, it seems a shame that more money cannot be channeled into educational television."
In 1964, at the high point of his Denver popularity, Max Morath moved to New York and became a one-man ragtime industry, playing club dates, making dozens of recordings Columbia Records, publishing a collection of 100 classic rags, appearing on "The Bell Telephone Hour," "Kraft Music Hall" and, for many years, "The Arthur Godfrey Show." Having created a successful one-man off-Broadway show, "Max Morath at the Turn of the Century," he has toured it to thousands of communities and colleges throughout the country.
In 1974, Morath reappeared briefly on public TV on a PBS special produced by WGBH, "Ragtime." As the show's host, he is featured along with Eubie Blake (then 91), E. Power Biggs and Gunther Schuller's youthful New England Conservatory Orchestra.
Here Morath, still slender and energetic, with a few more wrinkles in his smile, is confident and even more facile as he banters with the other performers, introduces songs and dances, and talks about life in 1905 as if he lives there part-time.
"I'm not about to retire," says Morath today. "Retire from what? I haven't had a steady job since 1959, and that was in a saloon. I have a mammoth concert tour planned for this season" (1996-97).
He had paused briefly in his career, however: in 1995, he became a full-time student at Columbia University where, in the spring of 1996, he received his master's degree in American studies. The subject of his dissertation was Carrie Jacobs Bond, a publisher and composer in the early 1900s. Bond wrote, according to Morath, two of the most popular songs of all time: "I Love You Truly," and "The End of a Perfect Day."
"The Ragtime Era" hugely expanded NET's audience. After its initial release NET made a circumspect and prescient, somewhat awkward, report to the Ford Foundation about the philanthropy on which its future, and that of public broadcasting, greatly depended: "'The Ragtime Era' may ultimately be responsible for greater good to a greater number of average TV viewers than many NET programs of greater intrinsic value."
In 1960 Jack White had good reason to look for programs that enlarged NET's audience. Commercial interests were bearing down on educational stations and challenging dozens of the FCC's noncommercial channel reservations around the country. Many observers were beginning to question the use of broadcast TV to serve small audiences with educational material. White found what he sought in "The Ragtime Era," an undeniably entertaining series with enough information to make it an acceptable educational venture. It conclusively tipped the education/entertainment balance, opening the door to "The Great American Dream Machine," "Masterpiece Theatre," "Great Performances," comedies from Britain, Mark Russell's satire and, in 1968, a name change, "public television."
David Stewart, contributing editor to Current magazine, recently retired as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's director of international activities. This article, reprinted with permission, is part of a future book on public TV programming.