William Hill

A Cradle for Ragtime William Hill

Bill Hill was the city editor of The Sedalia Democrat newspaper from 1960-1965. After Bill's death in 2014, his daughter JoAnn Hill Holcomb found the manuscript her father wrote for a book about Sedalia and Scott Joplin. She meticulously transcribed the manuscript and is publishing it as as written between 1960 and 1967. It is valuable for the interview accounts he described with the original surviving ragtime composers, G. Thomas "Tom" Ireland and Arthur Marshall. Bill's notes for the manuscript were lost but he does frequently cite his sources in the text of his book. "A Cradle for Ragtime" sheds light on the environment in which Joplin's classic ragtime compositions were written and on the remarkable nature of the composer's work.