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By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

Quick: What image comes to mind when you hear the word ragtime? Probably straw hats, lemonade and your kid trying to play “The Entertainer” on the piano. But in the 1890s and 1900s, the sound of the just-emerging musical style conjured something very different: dancing, drinking and sex. And Black people.

I was thinking about that the other day as I finally listened to Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” album. Specifically, it got me to thinking about how critics and scholars in the old days regarded ragtime as dismissible, while critics today revere it as an important part of our cultural heritage. It wasn’t just ragtime; it was all Black music, along with anything else that didn’t seek a place in so-called high culture. George Gershwin’s theatrical work is now revered, but it was once dismissed as the musical equivalent of junk food. Beyoncé’s album, on the other hand, was rightly received as art from the day it dropped. It isn’t just taste that has changed. It’s the way critics have shifted their relationship to popular culture generally. That change, which started a century ago and picked up speed at the halfway mark, has now become so much a part of how we encounter art that it’s almost invisible. But it’s a story very much worth telling. And it all starts with a tantalizing beat.

That was the heart of ragtime’s infectious appeal: syncopation, which played a tick-tocking bottom line against a melody that zigged when the bottom zagged.

By way of contrast, think of the best-known melody of a Sousa march like “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the one associated with the joke lyric “Be kind to your web-footed friends.” Note how the accent in the melody — on the words “kind,” “to,” “web” and “footed” — falls where the bottom beats do. It makes you want to clap on the 1 and 3 — “kind” and “web” — as opposed to the way anything Aretha Franklin sang makes you want to clap on the 2 and 4.

“Maple Leaf Rag,” a piece that Scott Joplin wrote in 1899 and that became a national hit still widely played today, is different. Lots of the accents in the melody fall between the bottom beats instead of on them. As mundane as that may seem, it creates a “catch” that makes you want to move with, within and against it. It is, yes, catchy. With its insistent beat and the hip-wiggly movements that it naturally inspired, dancing to ragtime felt sexy.

It was created by Black men, blending the Euro-American march below with a catch-me-if-you-can line on top that channeled African rhythms. Ragtime was a musical revolution, of a kind that could have happened only in America as Blacks and whites took cues from one another over generations. But elitism, Eurocentrism and racism kept American custodians of high culture from being able to see it. It took until the 1950s for a brigade of aficionados to start........

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