Is Ragtime or Boogie Woogie More Difficult to Play?
There is a long history of snobbery and resentment from some Ragtime players towards Boogie Woogie players. Interestingly, there does not seem to have been as much resentment from Boogie Woogie players towards Ragtime players. Specifically, the most resentment seems to have come from Ragtime players who tended to play with 2-to-the-bar, oom-pah, “striding” left hand bass figures. Ragtime and Boogie Woogie players still sometimes get into arguments over whether Ragtime or Boogie Woogie is more difficult to play. For example, one dimension of variability in broken-octaves of Boogie Woogie and the oom-pah bass of Ragtime is the size of the stride between one broken octave couplet to the next in Boogie Woogie, or between the “oom” and the “pah” in Ragtime. Quite often, the arguments over difficulty arise over claims from Ragtime players who say the wide strides in their oom-pah left had parts are harder to play than the closer intervals in some Boogie Woogie bass lines. Yet, size of stride
