Benjamin Robertson Harney

Background

Benjamin Robertson Harney was born on March 6, 1872 near Middleboro, Kentucky, in the Cumberland Mountains within three miles of the Tennessee border. He was the son of Benjamin Mills and Margaret Wellington (Draffen) Harney.

Harney's race has been called into question, including the possibility of some mix. The family's own genealogical research indicates, however, that he was of white heritage for many generations on both sides.

Education

Harney is known to have entered a military school in Kentucky at fourteen, where he had four years of schooling.

Already - although of white parentage - Harney had mastered the difficult piano technique later called ragtime, as well as the Negro style of singing then called "coon shouting" that later developed into "the blues. " Like Stephen Foster, who, a little earlier, had absorbed the vital rhythms and earthy folk melodies of the Negroes in Covington on the Ohio River to the north, Ben Harney felt their influence as a boy in this cradle of ragtime, an area roughly 700 miles east to west and 400 miles north to south, which includes Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas, eastern Kansas, southern Illinois, and most of Missouri.

At eighteen he left school.

Career

While still only seventeen Harney was trying to find someone to score a song he had written, "You've Been a Good Old Wagon But You've Done Broke Down. "

At eighteen he began the life of an itinerant entertainer. By nineteen he was playing in a saloon and dance hall on the southeast corner of Eighth and Liberty (then Green) Street in Louisville. Here he remained for five years, meeting a prominent young Louisvillian, Bruner Greenup, who paid the publishing costs of "You've Been a Good Old Wagon" (1895), which quickly became a national hit. It was probably the first wholly ragtime piece of music to be printed, although the name "ragtime" was not actually coined until 1897.

Harney was also the first to score the archaic blues form, in the verse of "Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose" (1896). Appearing in vaudeville in 1896 at Keith's Union Square Theatre in New York, Harney was an overnight success. For the most part he simply sat at the piano playing the then novel ragtime ("jig piano") and singing his own "coon songs, " though he sometimes interpolated buck-and-wing and other "eccentric" dances of the period, at which he was adept.

For the next twenty-odd years he was a headliner, riding the vast popularity of both ragtime and of vaudeville, which lasted until the United States entered World War I. During this time he wrote and published scores of songs, many of them hits, meanwhile touring America, the British Isles, the Far East, and portions of the South Pacific.

After a heart attack in 1923 Harney appeared but seldom on the vaudeville stage. This was in any case the decade when jazz eclipsed ragtime. By 1930 he was living with his wife in near destitution in a flat at 1510 North Gratz Street, Philadelphia. He died there of chronic nephritis and was buried in Fernwood Cemetery, Philadelphia.

Achievements

• Benjamin Robertson Harney went down in history as one of the most prominent composers and songwriters. As the first scored Afro-American syncopation, as the predecessor of jazz, as an international hit as early as 1899, and as an influence on composers from Satie and Debussy down to the present, ragtime has a historical importance that has only recently begun to be assessed. Harney did not, as he claimed, invent ragtime - no one man did - but he was one of its most gifted players and composers. He exerted considerable influence on a generation of students who used his texts. He also proved himself to be a competent research historian. His writings, along with his work as an educational administrator at Syracuse, formed a well-rounded professional career.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Steppin' To The Bad Side
  • Family
  • Joplin: Treemonisha / Act one - No. 2 The bag of luck
  • It's All Over (Dreamgirls/Broadway/Original Cast Version)
  • Firing Of Jimmy (Dreamgirls/Broadway/Original Cast Version)
  • Steppin' To The Bad Side (Dreamgirls/Broadway/Original Cast Version)
  • When I First Saw You
  • When I First Saw You (Sing-Along Version)
  • When I First Saw You (Dreamgirls/Broadway/Original Cast Version)

  • book

Connections

In 1897 Harney married Edyth Murray of Streator, Illinois. They later divorced, and he married an actress, Jessie Boyce, whose stage name was Jessie Haynes.

Father:

Benjamin Mills Harney

Mother:

Margaret (Draffen) Harney

Spouse:

Jessie (Boyce) Harney

Spouse:

Edyth Murray

References

• They All Played Ragtime