Eubie Blake

Eubie Blake (1887-1983) was born James Hubert Blake in Baltimore, the son of formerly enslaved parents. He learned the organ as a child and by his teens was playing ragtime in the sporting houses of the city. For most of his life he gave his birth year as 1883, and the error went uncorrected, so that when he died in February 1983 he was mourned, five days after a widely celebrated hundredth birthday, as a man who had reached a full century.

He said he composed the melody of Charleston Rag in 1899, though he did not commit it to paper until 1915. His lasting partnership was with the singer and lyricist Noble Sissle. Together they wrote Shuffle Along in 1921, one of the first Broadway musicals created and performed by Black Americans, and its songs, among them Love Will Find a Way and I'm Just Wild About Harry, outlived the show itself.

For decades Blake was treated as a figure from a vanished age, until the ragtime revival of the 1970s carried him back to the stage, recording and performing into his nineties. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. His playing holds the even, dancing pulse of ragtime while reaching toward the looser phrasing of the jazz that came after. Slowed down and studied a phrase at a time, it shows plainly how one music was turning into the next.