It's constantly going off that beat. Now we're into something very subjective here, but it creates an excitement. I can't explain why that is, but in the hands of someone that knows how to do it, it's exciting. And, therefore, in the first place, because it came from the black world and young people and was totally new and had dances beginning to be associated with it, which were considered immoral, the whole thing was considered at the time, except by the people who loved it, as gross, an intrusion, bad, whatever you want to say. This is not good for the American psyche.
Ragtime is insidious.
Now meanwhile you have all of these wonderful musicians, mostly black, but a few whites who are now doing exactly the same thing, in the same style, beginning to publish. Prior to that, by the way, he had had another rag published in Kansas City. We're talking 1899. Now the underground is finally beginning to surface, to simplify it, and to begin its takeover of popular music, which will take some time. He happens to have been the best, but to say that Joplin himself, with his emergence in 1899, started the whole thing is nonsense.