| Ben Harney |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT BEN HARNEY | |
| american songwriters | |
| harney, ben | |
| deaths by myocardial infarction | |
| people from memphis, tennessee | |
| 1872 births | |
| 1938 deaths | |
| vaudeville performers | |
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Benjamin Robertson "Ben" Harney ( 6 March , 1872 – 2 March , 1938 ) was a United States Of America Songwriter , Entertainer , and pioneer of Ragtime Music . Ben Harney is generally said to have been born in and William Selby Harney . Harney's tunes "You've Been a Good Old Wagon, But You've Done Broke Down", "Mister Johnson, Turn Me Loose", and "Cake Walk In The Sky" were big hits in the late 1890s . The sheet music version of Cake Walk in the Sky provided the first written out exammple of vocal ragging (early scat) and a recording of Harney singing (see below, although recorded many years later, fits early accounts of Harney's, then, very remarkable vocal style and suggests that Harney was singing very authentic sounding blues back in the 1890s. In January of 1896 Ben Harney moved to New York City , where he appeared regularly at Tony Pastor 's Music Hall. That same year Harney was referred to in print as "the rag time pianist". In 1897 Harney published his book ''Ben Harney's Rag Time Instructor'', the first description of how to ''rag'': how to improvise rag time music by syncopating unsyncopated popular tunes. His now rare instructor (arranged by Theodore Northrup) includes written-out examples of 'ragged' popular tunes including light classics and opera songs. Also in 1897, Harney married Edyth Murray of Streator, Illinois , an actress whose stage name was Jessie Haynes . Harney toured widely on the Vaudeville circuits in the USA , as well as tours of theaters in Europe and Asia , Australasia and the South Pacific. Once ragtime became popular he started billing himself as The Originator of Ragtime or "'''The Father Of Ragtime'''" , which most (but not all) of his contemporaries thought was an overstatement for the sake of advertising. Harney's act included him ragging tunes at the Piano , vocal ragging Scat Singing ), and dancing. Theatrical photographs from his Australasia tour (1911) show him dancing in blackface. Harney quit touring after suffering from a Heart Attack in 1928. Ben Harney died of a heart attack at the age of 66 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . LISTEN While Ben Harney unfortunately was neglected by commercial Recording Studio s during his lifetime, in 1925 a folklorist recorded Harney singing an example of an early rag-blues song on a Dictaphone Phonograph Cylinder , and this recording has survived. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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