Joseph Francis Lamb (December 6, 1887 to September 3, 1960)
Ragtime Compositions
1903 Walper House Rag 1905 Ragged Rapids Rag c.1907 Hyacinth - A Rag Greased Lightning (c.1907/1959) Rapid Transit (c.1907/1959) 1908 Rag-Time Special (c.1908/1959) Joe Lamb's Old Rag (c.1908/1959) Sensation Rag Dynamite Rag 1909 Ethiopia Rag Excelsior Rag 1910 Champagne Rag 1912 Spanish Fly 1913 American Beauty Rag 1914 Chasin' The Chippies 1915 Contentment Rag Ragtime Nightingale	1915 (Cont) Cleopatra Rag Reindeer 1916 Top Liner Rag Patricia Rag 1919 Bohemia Rag c.1959 Brown Derby #2 The Alaskan Rag The Beehive Rag The Jersey Rag Ragtime Reverie (19??) From Ragtime Treasures (©1964):    Alabama Rag    Arctic Sunset    Bird Brain Rag    Blue Grass Rag    Chimes of Dixie    Cottontail Rag    Firefly Rag    Good and Plenty Rag    Hot Cinders    The Old Home Rag    Ragtime Bobolink    Thoroughbred Rag    Toad Stool Rag
Songs, Marches and Waltzes
1901 Mignonne-Valse Lente 1902 Muskoka Falls-Indian Idyl     [w/Bill Edwards - 2006] 1903 Le Premier-March Golden Leaves-Waltzes 1904 Lorne Scots on Parade My Queen of Zanzibar 1905 Celestine Waltzes Florida The Lilliputians' Bazaar 1906 Sourdough March Red Feather - March Florentine: Valse 1907 Symphonic Syncopations (c.1907) The Lost Letter 1908 Sunset-A Ragtime Serenade Sweet Nora Doone [1] 1908 The Engineer's Last Good-Bye [1] I'm Jealous of You [1] She Doesn't Flirt [1] Somewhere a Broken Heart [2]     [w/Samuel A. White] In the Shade of the Maple by the     Gate [2] [w/Ruth Dingman]	1908 (Cont) Dear Blue Eyes: True Eyes [4] If Love is a Dream Let Me Never     Awake [4] Love's Ebb Tide [4] Three Leaves of Shamrock on the     Watermelon Vine [3] 1909 Gee, Kid! But I Like You The Homestead Where the Suwanee     River Flows Love in Absence [w/Mary A. O'Reilly] 1910 I Love You Just the Same [5] My Fairy Iceberg Queen [5] Playmates [w/Will Wilander] 1913 The Ladies' Aid Song [1] I Want to Be a Bird-Man [6] I'll Follow the Crowd to Coney [6] 1930 Purple Moon [7] So Here We Are [7] 1960 Since You Took Your Heart Away    1. as Harry Moore    2. as Earl West    3. as J. Lamb and H. Moore    4. w/Lynn Wood    5. w/Murray Wood    6. w/Mrs. G. Satterlee    7. w/Gus Collins

     Joe Lamb was born of emigrant Irish Catholic parents in Montclair, New Jersey. One of four children of James and Julia Lamb, including older siblings James Jr., Catherine and Annostesia, he was schooled early on by his father in the carpentry trade. At eight, he received some informal lessons, the only real training he ever got from his older sisters who were both promising keyboard instrument players. He also engaged in learning from the popular Etude magazine of the day, which featured many classical works and some light popular pieces.
     At the age of thirteen, Joe's father died, and he was sent to St. Jerome's College in Ontario for some engineering training. However, he could not keep the music bug out of his system, and started composing. Most of these early pieces were non-ragtime, but they were published in Toronto under the name of Josef F. Lamb during the first few years of the new century. One of the earliest, Muskoka Falls, was started when he was fourteen (finished by the author in 2006), an obvious response to Charles Daniels' enormously popular Hiawatha of 1902. It referred to a recreational resort area for the rich a bit north of Toronto. At one point the dormitory at the school was unavailable for a time, so he boarded at the Walper House in Kitchener, 50 or so miles west of Toronto, about which he wrote one of his earliest rags.
     After he got a job at age 16, Joe never returned to school, and eventually ended up working for a publishing house in New York City. Then came his fateful meeting with his idol, Scott Joplin. According to Lamb, he was in the publishing office of John Stark purchasing some of Joplin's more recent works in early 1908. Before leaving, he vocalized his wish to meet the master at some point, and the clerk pointed to a man with one leg wrapped up sitting across the room. "There he is." Lamb was enthralled, and after the accolades of admiration told Joplin that he had been writing ragtime too. So Joplin arranged for Lamb to play the rag for him, Sensation, that evening at a gathering. By the time Lamb finished his performance the room full of Joplin's friends had gone quiet. The Joplin said, "That sounded like a good colored rag," which is exactly what Lamb had wanted to hear. So Joplin arranged to have Sensation published by Stark, who published pretty much anything Lamb sent him from that point on.
     Lamb is listed in 1910 as living with Catherine and his mother Julia, but his profession is that of a clerk for what may be a music publisher. He was first married in 1911, when he moved to Brooklyn from Montclair. He had a ragtime orchestra for a brief time, and did some arranging, but certainly turned in some of the best ragtime pieces ever written during the 1910's. In 1914 he got a day job with a financing organization, and from that point on music was a serious hobby. His first wife, Henrietta, died near the end of the great WWI flu pandemic in 1920, leaving him with Joseph F. Lamb Jr. In 1920 he is listed not as a musician, but as a Bank Office Manager. Just the same, he was still composing, even if only to follow his own passion.
     Joe married his second wife, Amelia, in 1922. They moved to a house in Brooklyn where he would live for the rest of his life. Around this time he was contacted to write a novelty piano piece for Mills Music. The submission, titled Hot Cinders, was not published until after Lamb's death, but it stands up well to other novelties of the day. The Lambs are shown in 1930 as a family of six, including Joe Jr., Patricia, Richard and Robert. At this time he was a manger for an importing firm.
     In the late 1940's when They All Played Ragtime was first released, the whereabouts of Lamb were unknown by the authors, Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh. However, Lamb knew right where he was, as did others who read the book. He retired from his financial career in 1957, a little after the time of his "rediscovery". It was then that he took a number of rags out of mothballs that had been composed from the late 1910's to present recent ones, and played them into a tape recorder on two different occasions for posterity, once for a young Mike Montgomery, then for historian Sam Charters, the latter released on vinyl in the 1970s. He even performed for his first and only professional gig at Club 76 in Toronto in late 1959 through the efforts of Bob Darch, John Arpin and others.
     After a brief flurry of fame and widespread admiration, Joseph Lamb succumbed to a heart attack at home in 1960. Many of the unpublished rags were finally put into print in 1964, adding to a great legacy of the potential beauty of ragtime realized for all of us, although they have now been out of print since the early 1990s. Fortunately, many other rags and interesting songs spanning his entire career were published, many for the first time, in 2005 through the efforts of his daughter Patricia Lamb-Conn and performer Sue Keller of Ragtime Press in Chicago, followed by Sue's premier recordings of many of these works, and the author's own completion of yet another one of them. Joseph Lamb is clearly never to be forgotten.

     I would like to add a personal note of thanks to Lamb's surviving daughter Patricia Lamb-Conn, ragtime performer/publisher Sue Keller and researcher Ted Tjaden, who variously provided additional family information and background along with discoveries and printing of many previously unknown Lamb pieces, some of which were still surfacing in 2006.