Mississippi Rag now available on-line

[Lazaro Vega]

Leslie Johnson wrote:

The Mississippi Rag, now in its 35th year as "The Voice of Traditional Jazz

and Ragtime," is now free on its website, www.mississippirag.com, in a very

user friendly format. The latest transformation of the RAG took place in

January 2008. For the year prior to that, the RAG was online but in a PDF

format available only to subscribers. Now it's free to anyone who logs onto

www.mississippirag.com. Readers are encouraged to write to

editor@mississippirag.com if they want to be notified each month when the

new issue is available.

Both the latest change and the previous change (from a printed tabloid which

was mailed to 26 countries), were precipitated by the need to lessen the

workload of editor/publisher Leslie Johnson, who has been fighting a rare

form of cancer since mid-2005. Until her editorials announced the various

changes, many readers weren't aware that the RAG actually is produced by a

one-person editorial staff (Leslie) with occasional help from her sister,

Jody. Articles, reviews and columns are written by freelancers, not a

resident staff.

The health challenges, coupled with with increased printing prices,

two-digit hikes in second-class postal rates and the elimination of surface

mail to destinations outside the U.S., led to dropping the print RAG

altogether, but the move to an online RAG allowed for extensive use of color

and other innovative techniques. An online distributor was used for the PDF

version of the RAG but isn't necessary anymore now that the RAG is free off

its website..

The new free RAG includes many of the same kind of historical articles,

festival coverage, interviews, photos, columns, and listings that were

featured in both the printed and PDF-online RAGs. The look and feel of the

previous RAGs has been retained, but, with the new web-based format, it's

easier to read and print, thanks to the efforts of webmaster Jeff Holman and

Dave Lindquist of Protype Design. Ad revenue is expected to cover the costs

of producing the RAG. Each page includes ads which are hyperlinked to

websites. The ads also can be enlarged to their own separate pages as a

convenience for printing them out to make reservations for the various

events.

The response to the new RAG has been very positive, and traffic to the

website has been heavy, with more than 6500 visitors checking out the

January RAG within its first three weeks online -- good news for

advertisers. (That issue is still available for viewing.) The February RAG

was released Feb. 10, and 2500 visitors have already checked it out in just

the first five days, so the RAG's future looks bright.

`````` --end--

[Dan Gould]

It would be nice if they put the back issues online, because in my interview with Eddie Higgins he told a funny story about a picture that they ran with a profile of Eddie. Cadence dropped it from the published transcript, but here it is from my original:

EH: Are you familiar with this magazine, Mississippi Rag?

DG: No.

EH: As it says, The Voice of Traditional Jazz and Ragtime. This is mostly for Dixieland people but they decided to do a story on me and it turned out to be seven pages, with a lot of pictures—here’s a picture of me when I was seven, living in Andover. My Father took that. There's Richard Evans. When this arrived, I got a package from the Mississippi Rag with about seven copies when it came out. When I took one out and Clifford immediately grabbed it and took it in his mouth and ran around the room with it showing it to the other dogs cause his picture’s in here. There. There’s Clifford. (shows picture of his dog, Clifford Brown)

(Reading caption) It says, “He relaxes with his dog in the gazebo at his summer home in Cape Cod.” So he went around and showed it to his friends and they said “What do you mean ‘his dog’—how do we know that’s you, it doesn’t say ‘Clifford Brown’?” So he came back with his tail between his legs and says, “They don’t believe me.” And, so I looked at the caption and I said, “Well I don’t blame them, that’s terrible.” So I called up, actually I faxed the guy that wrote the story, he lives in New England. And I said, “Dear George, thank you for the most lengthy and totally researched article ever about me in a national magazine.” Which is true. “On the other hand, my dog is miffed because you used the picture of us in the gazebo on Cape Cod but you didn’t put his name in and Clifford Brown is a name which is familiar to all jazz lovers all over the world and he was very upset about it.” I got a fax back from him, he said, “I did put his name in the caption the editors removed it because they thought it would offend their black readers.” So I faxed back to him, “What black readers?” (laughs)

DG: He better not come back, Clifford will take a bite out of him.

EH: Clifford Brown’s widow thinks its great that we have a dog named Clifford Brown. I showed her Clifford’s picture and I said, “This is our dog, Clifford Brown,” and she said, “Oh how great!” She said, “He would have loved that.”