This dissertation studies ragtime music and its revivals in order to understand social and cultural currents within 20th-century America. The first three chapters are case studies of ragtime music in three different historical moments. Chapter One analyzes ragtime in its incarnation as a popular music around the year 1900, and argues that the ragtime “coon song” mediated America’s transition to Taylorist industrial capitalism. Chapter Two treats two distinct ragtime revivals that emerged around 1950—a “folk” revival spearheaded by Rudi Blesh, and a “folksy” nostalgia product marketed by pianists clustered around Lawrence Welk. It argues that these revivals were reactions to the historical course of jazz music, and thereby also expressive of the dissatisfactions typical of mid-century American Fordism. Chapter Three focuses on the Scott Joplin cult that emerged in the 1970s, and the contradictory attempts to frame his music as an “art music.” Finally, the fourth chapter theorizes these three dis- tinctions within the concept of music—folk, popular, art—as intimations of the social forms available under capitalism and offers some grounds for grasping the content of the previous chapters as necessary components of the historical phase of capitalism they punctuate. Drawing on ideas from Hegel and Marx, it grounds the findings of the previous chapters as generalizable events in the musical life of a dynamic capitalism. Because this dissertation regards ragtime as not one music but three, the source-base of this dissertation is varied. Books, newspapers, magazines, films, television, radio interviews, song-sheets, and recorded music are considered. In addition to making contributions to the history of ragtime revivalism, this dissertation contributes towards the project of a materialist music history and a materialist music analysis.