"La Pas Ma La" is a composition published by

minstrel A minstrel was an entertainer, initially in medieval Europe. The term originally described any type of entertainer such as a musician, juggler, acrobat, singer or fool; later, from the sixteenth century, it came to mean a specialist enter ...

performer

Ernest Hogan Ernest Hogan (born Ernest Reuben Crowdus; 1865 – May 20, 1909) was the first Black American entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show, '' The Oyster Man'' in 1907, (shows at the African Grove Theatre preceded it by generations) and h ...

in 1895 and recognized as the first published ragtime work. With his troupe, the Georgia Graduates, Hogan created a comedy dance called the "Pasmala" consisting of a walk forward with three steps back, and in 1895 composed and published a song based on this dance. The song's chorus was: :Hand upon yo' head, let your mind roll back, :Back, back back and look at the stars :Stand up rightly, dance it brightly :That's the Pas Ma La.''Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing'' by Mark Knowles, McFarland & Company, 2002, , pages 119-20.Gushee, Lawrence
"The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz."
Black Music Research Journal 14, no. 1 (1994): 1-24. doi:10.2307/779456. Despite being recognized as the first published ragtime work, the copyright for ''You've Been a Good Old Wagon but You Done Broke Down'' – another contender for the title – was registered in January of 1895 (Greenup Music Co
source
a few months prior to ''La Pas Ma La'' (September of 1895, J. R. Bel
source
suggesting ''You've Been a Good Old Wagon'' in fact was the first of the two.

References

External links

La Pas Ma La
Box 141, Item 166 Lester Levy sheet music collection Johns Hopkins The Sheridan Libraries 1895 songs Rags {{US-music-stub