- published: 19 Oct 2007
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Black and White Rag is a 1908 ragtime composition by George Botsford.
The first known recording of this piece was by Albert Benzler, recorded on Lakeside/U.S.Everlasting Cylinder #380 in June 1911. This recording is somewhat rare (Lakeside/U.S.Everlasting cylinders, though molded celluloid on a wax/fiber core, were made in small batches), and significant. Edison featured the Black & White Rag on one of his Early Diamond Disc Records (50116)from 1913 played by a Brass Orchestra.
One of the best known versions of this piece of music was recorded in 1952 by pianist Winifred Atwell, and helped her to establish an international profile. Originally the B-side of another composition, Cross Hands Boogie, Black and White Rag was championed by the popular disc jockey Jack Jackson, and started a craze for Atwell's honky-tonk style of playing. The recording became a million selling gold record, and in the UK was later used as the theme tune for the long-running BBC2 television snooker tournament, Pot Black.
Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.
Black-and-white as a description may be considered something of a misnomer, in that the images are not ordinarily starkly contrasted black and white, but combine black and white in a continuum producing a range of shades of gray. Further, many prints, especially those produced earlier in the development of photography, were in sepia (mainly for archival stability), which yielded richer, more subtle shading than reproductions in plain black-and-white. Of course color photography provides a much greater range of shade, but part of the appeal of black and white photography is its more subdued monochromatic character.
Some popular black-and-white media of the past include:
Since the advent of color, black-and-white mass media often connotes something "nostalgic", historic, or anachronistic. For example, the 1998 Woody Allen film Celebrity was shot entirely in black-and-white, and Allen has often made use of the practice since Manhattan in 1979. Other films, such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), American History X, Pleasantville and The Phantom of the Opera (2004) play with the concept of the black-and-white anachronism, using it to selectively portray scenes and characters who are either more or less outdated or duller than the characters and scenes shot in full-color. This manipulation of color appears in the film Sin City and the occasional television commercial. Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings of Desire uses sepia-tone black-and-white for the scenes shot from the angels' perspective. When Damiel, the angel (the film's main character), becomes a human, the film changes to color emphasising his new "real life" view of the world.
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