Joseph F Lamb

Joseph Francis Lamb was an American composer of ragtime for piano, born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1877 and died in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960. Regarded as one of the three great composers of piano ragtime alongside Scott Joplin and James Scott, he remained unidentified for decades, as it was assumed that he was an African American from the Midwest like his fellow composers. His importance rests on a small but very carefully crafted body of work.

Lamb was a protégé of Scott Joplin, and his first published rag, Sensation, appeared in 1909 with the explicit endorsement of Joplin. Between that date and 1919 he composed twelve rags that sustain his reputation. In adult life he worked in Brooklyn's textile trade, which gave rise to the romantic image of a loner remote from the music business of Tin Pan Alley. This image is apparently partly false: Lamb did seek to make his mark on Tin Pan Alley, publishing several songs and assorted pieces, and he continued composing well into the 1920s. After being rediscovered in 1949 by Blesh and Janis, he resumed composing, performed in public occasionally and made his first recordings in 1959. An anthology of his work was published in 1964.

According to his own testimony, Lamb distinguished two deliberate styles. So-called light rags, such as Champagne or Bohemia, rest on catchy melodic lines and transparent textures, and culminate in the commercial idiom of the cakewalk and the two-step. Heavy rags, such as American Beauty or The Ragtime Nightingale, abound in complex syncopations, dense textures and virtuosic passages. In these works he synthesised features of Joplin and Scott with elements of his own: diatonic and chromatic melodies rather than pentatonic ones, chromatic harmony with a predilection for the diminished seventh chord, and a notable use of sequential writing, unusual in ragtime. His greatest structural achievement was the complete elimination of the four-bar break, as can be seen in the opening phrases of American Beauty and Top Liner.

His legacy lies in having refined the piano rag until it became a composition of intimate character. His posthumous work Alaskan Rag is considered by many to be the supreme lyrical and melodic achievement in the piano literature of ragtime.