shows of the mid-1800s, but, as with jazz, any clear knowledge of when the ragtime style first emerged seems impossible in view of the lack of documentation. The career of the Creole composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69) offered some tantalizing clues about the very old age of these genres since his work featured clear ragtime elements, portents of jazz style, and even some of the Latin American traits that did not become well-known until the 1890s. As Gammond notes, however, the prophetic quality of Gottschalk's music is probably misleading because he is simply a very rare example of a known composer who employed the "musical features and flavours that were current in unrecorded popular music of the time" (236).
Many of the differences between jazz and ragtime derived from the basic difference that ragtime "is primarily a written style, whereas jazz is primarily improvised" (Bolcom 23). Even these distinctions are not absolute, but their influence on the histories of the two kinds of music is apparent. The written music spread
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