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“The Brightest Star”: Aida Overton Walker in the Age of Ragtime and Cakewalk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Richard Newman
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Extract

A golden period of African- American music and dance nourished from the mid-1890s until the First World War. Minstrelsy had been the country's leading vernacular entertainment for half a century, but it was now in decline. Its sentimentality and nostalgia appeared passé and rustic in the more sophisticated and urbanized Gilded Age. An old order was breaking up and a new, looser, freer order taking its place, one that called for a faster beat.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 18 , October 1993 , pp. 465 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

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