Joseph Lamb (composer)

Joseph Francis Lamb (December 6, 1887 – September 3, 1960) was an American composer of ragtime music.

The ragtime of Joseph Lamb ranges from standard popular fare to complex and highly engaging.

His use of long phrases was influenced by classical works he had learned from his sister and others while growing up, but his sense of structure was potentially derived from his study of Joplin's piano rags.

The youngest of four children, he taught himself to play the piano and admired the early ragtime publications of Scott Joplin.

Joplin was impressed with Lamb's compositions and recommended him to ragtime publisher John Stark.

Henrietta died of influenza in 1920 about the same time that popular music interest shifted from ragtime to jazz.

Jack Mills, Inc. hired Lamb to write four novelty piano solos, (being "Cinders", "Shooting the Works", "Chime In", and "Crimson Rambler") in the early 1920s, but these were unpublished and lost until the 2010s.

A year before his death in 1960 the album Joseph Lamb: A Study in Classic Ragtime was released by Folkways Records.