Novelty piano

A successor to ragtime and an outgrowth of the piano roll music of the 1910s, it can be considered a pianistic cousin of jazz, which appeared around the same time.

Early Charley Straight novelties include "S'more," "Playmor," "Nifty Nonsense," "Rufenreddy," and "Wild And Wooly."

Its popularity quickly led to other Confrey works including "Dizzy Fingers" and "Greenwich Witch", and inspired other artists to issue novelty pieces.

By the mid-teens, though, two new technologies had appeared which allowed the general public to hear music as performed by skilled musicians: the piano roll and the phonograph record.

Prominent artists in the novelty piano genre include Zez Confrey, Charley Straight, Roy Bargy, Pauline Alpert, Fred Elizalde, Rube Bloom, Clement Doucet, Max Kortlander, Edythe Baker and Billy Mayerl.