Three of the St. Louis Ragtimers are in this group:  Bill Mason, Glenn Meyer and Don Franz.  Any gig these days is hard to come by, so "hat's off" to these guys for landing a steady job and to Evangeline's for continuing the Tradition of Traditional Jazz in the West End.  We recently made a documentary video about the Music Scene in Gaslight Square.  It is based on some very "Lost" tapes of two brilliant Traditional Folk musicians but also features history about Gaslight and Jazz.  

The Goldenrod Festival Archive with over 100 hours of video and photos is online.

In 2018 three of the four surviving members of The Ragtimers re-united at Focal Point Concerts where Bill was a member of T.J. Muller's group and Don sat in for a few songs on tuba.   You can still see and hear Bill playing around town with T.J. and with Bill's son's group, "Sins of The Pioneers."  Al and Don are still active at St. Louis Banjo club events and were on a float with the club in a televised parade in Downtown St. Louis.  They are still greatly appreciated by St. Louis for their contributions to St. Louis and Music History.
Here's a commissioned Trebor Tichenor composition, "The Cape Rose Rag"

St. Louis Ragtimers Videos & Playlist

Here's a song from their last Sheldon concert....
​     In 2011, the 50th Year that the St. Louis Ragtimers had been playing as a group, we released some archived audio and video recordings. This LIVE! audio recording from the final set of the 1979 Goldenrod Showboat Ragtime Festival was located among the many hundreds of hours of recordings made by Don Franz. This session is special because it was recorded in the Captain's Bar with better acoustics than the big concert hall. Many of the bands' self-tapings did not capture the vocals effectively.. but again, we were lucky with this one. The set ran exactly the right length to fill a traditional vinyl "LP", which makes us all wish this recording had been discovered 30 years ago.
    Don Franz, the band's tuba player and co-owner of the National Heritage Site, Goldenrod Showboat thinks he did the taping because he disappeared from the stage several times which allowed them to use guest tuba players.  After one of these interludes, frontman Al Stricker introduced Don back to the stage as a "guest" performer.  These guys had a lot of mutual respect for the  knowledge and skill the others possessed.  They rarely had serious disagreements but behind closed doors could bicker like an old married couple. 
     This recording is a good example of the contrast between live and studio Ragtime performance.  Booze loosens things up considerably, the crowd gets jumpin' and before too long the jazz is almost as hot as the polyester rayon outfits.  It wasn't just the Goldenrod Showboat, these gentlemen of Jazz have been a National Treasure.