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Brun Campbell
The Rag-Time-Warp

By Richard Egan

Years ago, when I was an impressionable teenager, a few events seem to have had a noticeable impact on my life. The first was viewing The Sting and being introduced to Scott Joplin's music. The second was learning about Trebor Tichenor's Ragophile program on KWMU, which forced me to purchase a cassette recorder and commence a decade of bootleg tape recording. The third event occurred on a February night in 1976 when, while listening to Ragophile, I was introduced to Brun Campbell's piano playing through "Chestnut Street in The 90's," an experience which must be termed nothing short ofa revelation. There was something in Campbell which was markedly different from that which I had been hearing in the recordings of Joshua Rifkin and other Joplin interpreters, something closer to the earthy origins of music, almost primordial. I felt like my ear was treated to sounds like through a time machine, listening not into a radio's speaker but through a doorway of a boisterous, rugged brick saloon in that gently sloping valley between 17th Street and Jefferson Avenue.

Brun Campbell was born not in a big city sporting district, but, contrarily, into a frontier family on March 26, 1884, and spent his childhood in the harsh climate of the plains of northwestern Kansas. He was witness to much excitement during his youth: his father took part in the Cherokee Strip land rush in 1893 but failed to acquire property, and thence became a traveling salesman, canying his family throughout the newly-settled Indian Territory. Young Brun was given piano lessons which allowed him to be capable of playing the pop songs of the 1890's. At the age of fourteen, he sat down to a piano in a music store in Oklahoma City, and, as chance would have it, was noticed by Otis Saunders, a pianist and close friend of Scott Joplin. Aocording to Campbell, Saunders was carrying an inked manuscript of "Maple Leaf Rag," which was not published until the following year, and challenged the adolescent to play it. Once Campbell knew about Joplin, Sedalia, and the ragtime life, his heart was set upon living that life, and soon left home for Sedalia. Joplin nicknamed him "The Ragtime Kid" and gave him lessons. In the decade prior to his death in 1952, Campbell's claim to fame was "I was Scott Joplin's only white pupil.

"Campbell's veracity has been questioned over the years. He told many tales, with subjects ranging from marksmanship to performing for famous outlaws, and often contradicted himself. I have wondered, if he actually had been a student of Joplin's, why was his music so crude in comparison to Joplin's? He mustn't have been a very good student! There is sufficient evidence, however, that he was in Sedalia around 1900, and known to the black community there. Regardless of what is fact and fiction in the life of Brun Campbell, he is significant for this reason: he was a time warp. After his Sedalia experience, he played piano in the saloons and sporting houses across the Midwest and south, then became a bartender and faded from sight for more than thirty years. Other pianists who perservered in the music business beyond the ragtime years changed their playing styles in order to keep current with popular music. Campbell had no reason to do so. He reappeared in the Los Angeles area in the 1940's playing, apparently, in the same style as before 1910. The couple ofdozen recordings he made are considered to be the most authentic examples of early midwestern saloon ragtime that exist. Many ofthese recordings have been reissued on the Euphonic Sounds label.

[Richard Egan, former vice president of the FSJH, is the author of "Brun Campbell: The Music Of The Ragtime Kid" in which he transcribed 22 Campbell rags, published in collaboration with board member Barry Morgan in 1993.]

Brun Campbell The Rag-Time-Warp

Brun Campbell
The Rag-Time-Warp