Ben Harney

During the early years of Harney's career, he falsely promoted himself as being the inventor of ragtime and never acknowledged the genre's black origin.

His grandfather was John Hopkins Harney, the first mathematics professor at Indiana University and author of the first algebra textbook ever published in the United States.

He counted two prominent U.S. generals as distant cousins: Lew Wallace and William Selby Harney.

Harney's tunes "You've Been a Good Old Wagon but You Done Broke Down", "Mister Johnson, Turn Me Loose", and "Cake Walk In The Sky" were big hits in the late 1890s.

This was one of the earliest known references to ragtime on sheet music and some sources have regarded the composition as being the first published rag.

The sheet music version of "Cake Walk in the Sky" provided the first written out example of vocal ragging (early scat).

On the cover to the sheet music, "Cake Walk in the Sky" is described as a "March A La Ragtime" and as "A Rag-Time Nightmare".

In January 1896 Harney moved to New York City, where he appeared regularly at Tony Pastor's Music Hall.

Time wrote that "the first man to write ragtime down on paper was a slick-haired Kentuckian, Ben Harney."