“Maple Leaf Rag” in Maple Leaf Country: Impressing Jazz upon Vera Guilaroff

Vanessa,

Before we even get together I want to impress upon you that Vera was not a ‘ragtime pianist’. She was a pianist of many talents, ragtime being just one of them. Her repertoire included all genres, popular, jazz, classical, Broadway, etc. She was a very special lady, married to a successful Montreal businessman, so playing piano was more of a hobby than a profession for her. I look forward to meeting you and sharing my memories of this remarkable woman.

James¹

Vera Guilaroff (1902–74) was the first Canadian woman to have made a jazz record.² Since her archival materials have yet to be compiled in an institutional archive, my research necessitated reaching out to family members and collaborators, including James Kidd, who wrote the email cited above. Back in the early sixties, Kidd had been the only Canadian member of the Record Research Associates, a discography group based in New York that attempted to reconstruct the listings of the Pathé/Perfect record label. Upon the group’s discovery of some of Vera Guilaroff’s records (originally for the Montreal-based Apex but also distributed in the United States), Kidd took on the mission of finding out more about her, eventually meeting her on several occasions between her Art Deco home in uptown Montreal and her country house on the lake in the Quebec Laurentians.

She was thrilled that anyone was interested in her and her recordings! She had long since been retired of course and played only for pleasure. The obvious next step was to record her, so on a warm night in June of 1964 I drove her to the CFCF studios (about 8PM), wheeled the grand piano from shipping into the large studio (nothing had been booked for the studio so we were alone), set up two microphones (one for voice the other for the piano) . . . and asked her to play whatever she wished. She wore a very fancy dress and was prepared for the session. She looked great and was in a happy frame of mind. . . . Needless to say, the guys at Record Research were delighted with the recording that I send [sic] them afterward.³

The particular recording session that Kidd arranged, during which the then “comfortably retired . . . older lady” interspersed some of her favorite pieces with thoughts, memories, and anecdotes from earlier times (in Guilaroff’s words, “There’s going to be some rambling tonight”), is a remarkable and richly textured archival document that contextualizes her music-making and testifies to her own outlook on her musical career.⁴ It also features, in closing, one of Guilaroff’s most famous numbers, the “Maple Leaf Rag,” nearly forty years after her first recording and documented live performance of that piece in 1926. “And now I think I’m going to close this part of this tape until sometime when I can have the pleasure of playing for you in person. And I wonder if you’d like to hear the ‘Maple Leaf Rag.’ Would you?”⁵

The issue of labeling—was she or wasn’t she a “ragtime pianist”?—emerges clearly in Kidd’s initial email, an issue that has been implicated in Guilaroff’s lack of historical visibility. As a pianist, improviser, radio broadcaster, composer, and recording artist, Guilaroff enjoyed a musical career of international standing. Yet to this day, her recorded output remains in the possession of scattered collectors. According to the closest family member I interviewed, the most likely location of the rest of her personal archive is the “garbage.”⁶ In addition to common naming difficulties related to historical research about women—in this case, references in official and public documents to Vera Raginsky (her married name, which she almost never used herself), “Miss” Guilaroff, and aliases such as Max Darewski and Vera Hardman (on alternate takes of songs released on Microphone and Domino)—issues of genre categorization have complicated Guilaroff’s inclusion into existing music-historical narratives. To this day, novelty piano—that variety of flashy, fast-tempoed, and thick-textured syncopated piano music from...