06/01/2009

By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER  / Associated Press

Ragtime jazz scholars consider J.W. "Blind" Boone a historical footnote. Devotees in the town he called home as an adult say the composer and pianist was a musical treasure ripe for preservation.

The child prodigy whose eyes were surgically removed by doctors as an infant is invoked often at the annual "Blind" Boone Ragtime and Early Jazz Festival, which began Sunday on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus and continues through Tuesday.

Though less known than such ragtime standard bearers as Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton, Boone significantly influenced a genre that paved the way for modern American popular music by introducing syncopation, said festival organizer Lucille Salerno.

So when the late musician's dilapidated home in downtown Columbia was put up for sale a dozen years ago, Salerno and others formed the John William Boone Heritage Foundation.

The city of Columbia bought the house, a former funeral home, for $163,510 in 2000. Some structural fixes ensued, but the home's renovation has largely languished for lack of money.

Elected leaders recently agreed to tap into a $225,000 repair account set aside years ago with the hope of obtaining matching federal grants. An equivalent amount from private benefactors is still needed for interior work, Salerno said.

The goal: a museum or similar living history shrine to honor one of Columbia's most influential sons. Festival proceeds go toward the needed repairs.

"It really should stand as a shrine, a tribute to this man," said Salerno, a psychologist who directs the university's continuing education program. "It's from his music that we can take this developmental photo of American music."

Boone, the son of a runaway slave owned by the descendants of pioneer Daniel Boone, was born in 1864 at a federal Army camp near the Saline County town of Miami, Mo.

He spent his early years in Warrensburg before moving to the residential state school for the blind in St. Louis.

Rather than make brooms, as his teachers demanded, Boone sneaked into the Mississippi River city's Tenderloin district to hear a nascent form of music on the piano. Kicked out of school, he instead began a musical journey that took him throughout the country and reportedly as far as England before he died from a heart attack in 1927.

Boone's musical acumen was legendary, said ragtime scholar Jack Rummel, a retired dentist from Boulder, Colo., and one of the Boone festival's masters of ceremonies.

"He had a standing $1,000 bet that he could play back anything that he heard on the piano," Rummel said. "He never had to pay off that bet. He had a phenomenal ear for music."

From its perch along the Mississippi, a major north-south transportation route, St. Louis and the rest of Missouri emerged as the "cradle of ragtime" in the late 19th Century, Rummel said.

The music fell out of popular favor soon after World War I, only to be revived in the early 1970s when "The Sting" — a movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford — became a runaway hit. The movie's signature song was a remake of "The Entertainer," a Scott Joplin rag written in 1902.

These days, ragtime festivals in Indianapolis, Sacramento, Columbia and elsewhere draw small but loyal audiences eager to watch keyboard virtuosos such as Morten Gunner Larsen, a classically trained pianist from Norway, and 17-year-old Adam Swanson, who discovered ragtime on his grandparents' computer.

Many of the ragtime lovers at the Columbia festival will head to Sedalia later this week for another event honoring Joplin, who also spent time in Missouri.

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On the Net:

Blind Boone Festival, http://www.blindboone.missouri.org

Scott Joplin Festival, http://www.scottjoplin.org/festival.htm