Ragtime craze came to its end in the late 1910s, early twenties. Blues and jazz (and swing from the end of the twenties) became the most popular styles. The reasons were not only musical and it was not only because the audience had enough of ragtime after that two decades. There were other reasons as well. When the music of blacks, ragtime became accepted among whites in America, the yankee community mainly saw the exoticism of the style in it and at the same it saw the true, original American musical style develop. Even though this phenomenon was received with scepticism by many, the music, along with its dance style, soon conquered the country.

Ragtime gained ground not only in ballrooms visited by white lower middle class people, it became the major music played in the elegant meeting points of the elite as well. But the genre, no matter how light and dance-like it seemed at the beginning, proved to be heavy, rural and lowbrow partly because of its marching band roots. The fairly simple, ragtime dance of moderate tempo was danced mostly in 19th century, relatively heavy clothes and it did not meet the requirements of the young generation after World War I. Also, the younger representatives of the increasingly strengthening elegant middle classes wore no tuxedo and high-hat with walking stick but light, loose and stylish suits. They went to places of entertainment even at night wearing such rather casual clothes. More and more colleges and universities opened, and with the comfortable clothes of the students the easy, elegant and white (!) wiev of life was reflected in fashion. Young ladies became girls, sometimes dancing in ecstasy on the tables wearing almost-mini skirts, being driven crazy by the music of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, for example, as it can be seen on film-recordings of that time. These youngsters needed joyful, faster music, sometimes slow, suitable for lovers dancing. It had to be white but exotic. Because of the lighter clothes, jazz dances began to include more acrobatic elements as well - or maybe the dance had an effect on clothing?

Since whites fast learned how to play ragtime and they played it smoother but with the same if not greater success than their black colleagues, Afro-Americans soon started to adjust their style to theirs and this caused a mutual but not slavish imitation between the races. Now Americans did not want to hear European marching music Americanized by Afro-Americans but the newly-born true American music based on it. The dance music that became known as American music by the whole world. The dance music whose really original and exotic representatives in the ragtime and early jazz era were Afro-American jazz musicians. Afro-American musicians, due partly to an emerging black high society, had better and stronger positions in American society as a whole - despite the fact that racial discrimination was (and at certain places still is!) an important factor of existing social problems. However, white musicians (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey brothers, Harry James, Artie Shaw etc.) were the leading personalities in jazz and swing, although many coloured musicians could be found among the best known band leaders and soloists, too (Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, the Harlem stride pianists, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum). In spite of the stylistic, instrumental and social similarities and rapprochement of black and white musicians, it was a small scandal when Benny Goodman founded his mixed quartet including the famous Goodman-Krupa-Hampton-Wilson crew. But then this became accepted, too. And soon Afro-American musicians were looked at not as exotic and Afro but American in the first place. (One can think of the tours of Duke Ellington and his Orchestra organized by the State Department after World War Two.)

In the meantime, America not only felt and made everyone else feel its leading position in every field but, together with the rise of the economy, music also became an industry. Radio stations and record companies played an important role in advertising. The business of music printing, that was the prime source of music in the ragtime era, rivaled only by record and piano roll publishing, declined drastically. Piano music was mostly replaced by songs with lyrics. The radio and the gramophone became important accessories of middle-class homes and the piano survived only in upper class homes where mostly classical pieces or new musical hits were played instead of ragtime. The hegemony of solo pianists and smaller jazz bands was inherited by extremely expensive big bands, due to the show-business, money, live radio broadcasts, record publishing and American megalomania. Soloists and small combos became favourites of a particular music-loving elite and small clubs. In spite of the years of the Great Depression and Prohibition the process of industrialization of music was almost continuously gaining momentum although many jazz musicians lost their jobs. Jazz clubs were ideal places for secret drinking, money laundering and the black market, most jazz musicians, similar to the early New Orleans and later Chicago eras, had some connection with the mob and survived those difficult years with a relative ease.

Of course, we cannot forget the appearance of the most popular soloists and orchestras on film. Propaganda, popularity, the industrialization of jazz in addition, led to the over-servicing of the public and influenced the repertoire of swing musicians in a rather negative way. ‘Sweet’ was the worst stylistic period of swing and all this resulted in the revolution of bebop at the beginning of the forties. But this is another story.

As jazz became ‘whiter’, lighter and more elegant, there was a need for some instrumental changes. Orchestras started using string basses instead of tuba, guitar instead of the strumming banjo. The change from violins to saxophones, as it happened in most bands, had another reason besides the obvious acoustic and stylistic ones, I believe: saxes had a very appropriate, exotic quality for oriental tunes, jungle music, and later sweet music as well. (Violins and complete string sections besides the saxes were in fashion again in the latter style from Paul Whiteman’s ‘symphonic jazz’ productions to Nat King Cole’s heartbreaking hits.) Although the ‘show’ seemed to have more and more significance, jazz became more sophisticated and artistic at the same time, and jazz composers often had serious ideas in their compositions. And if someone still had idols to follow, these were not Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and Wagner but Debussy, Ravel and their contemporaries who composed much more transparent and glittering music both in texture and sound. However, it was still necessary for arrangers in the swing era to study the classics, as they could not get inspiration from the ragtime and hot jazz bands but had European classical examples to follow.

It can be said then that musical differences between the ragtime and the swing era, and the direction of musical development can be traced back to social and economic reasons. This is not at all surprising if we accept the old proposition that arts always reflect social processes. It can also be mentioned as a reason that the exhaustion of every style is caused by being made into business and then diluted. To use a strange example: when it is impossible to squeeze more juice out of an orange people need a new orange. Since everyone wants to have as much juice as possible (i.e. success), many non-experts will also take their share, thus the process is much more about squeezing (business) and not the orange itself (music). If there is no more juice in the new orange, a next one must be found. But, of course, more or less the very same people will do the squeezing as before thus the rules will be the same. It means that changes from one musical era or style to the other are caused not only by musical reasons but are the results of an economical process linked with political and social changes. Thus, the real profit is gained by non-musicians and, waht is even worse, musicians often have to adjust their artistic goals and taste to that of the public directed by business and the media.