Barrelhouse music is the sort of piano music you hear coming softly through the flaking shutters of the questionable little frame houses on the streets down by the railroad station in Charleston, Memphis, Birmingham, Mobile. Still preserved here & there in the squalid social amber of the deep South, it is a fusion of ragtime and blues that flowered in the 20th Century's first decade. And it is important as a U. S. folk-music form because it almost died giving birth to jazz. It got its name from the place where it was (and...
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