It's not my intention to turn this into a musical blog, but lately I've been delighted to find some of my old piano recordings - - and I'm intent on inflicting them upon you, even if it's against your will.
A catalogue of my piano recordings indicates that I made nearly fifty recordings of ragtime music, including twenty pieces by Scott Joplin.
Unfortunately nearly all of these were lost.
Last night I happened to find about half a dozen of my ragtime recordings, and I quickly slapped together a video that I could post here.
This long-forgotten piano gem is called the Chicken Chowder Rag. Amazingly, it was written by a sixteen-year-old girl named Irene M. Giblin (1888-1974) and was first published in 1905 when she was seventeen.
Irene Mary Giblin
Giblin, who was from St. Louis, started playing the piano at an early age. By the time she was fourteen, she was hired to play the piano at the Grand Leader Department Store - where she performed all the latest hits from the Jerome H. Remick music catalogue.
Although Irene Giblin had a promising musical career and published numerous highly popular piano compositions, she abandoned her professional pursuits in 1908 when she married an accountant named Edward O'Brien. Her last published piano rag appeared in 1913. She died at the age of eighty-five in 1974.
Here's my performance of Chicken Chowder.