While William Christopher O'Hare stayed mainly behind the scenes of the ragtime era, never to become a Ben Harney, Ernest Hogan, or Kerry Mills, a Joe Lamb, James Scott, or Scott Joplin, for many years he made his mark in the music world. Suffering the fate of having his name all but forgotten, remembered primarily by ragtime pianists and ensembles who have performed and recorded "Levee Revels" and by some ragtime fans who have attended their concerts and bought their recordings, W. C. O'Hare was an experienced teacher and director, a diversified composer and talented arranger and orchestrator, a humorous and determined man with a life-long appreciation for the varied traditions of African-American music ...

   ... As early as the mid-19th century, Shreveport publicly appreciated and even granted some special privileges to its black musicians. Municipal records dated Tuesday, June 26, 1849, indicate that the city council approved the "Ethiopian Band's" request "to play & practice on their instruments" within the town limits until 11:00 p.m., provided they had "a written pass or permission from their master or owner" and they "notify constable of the time and place of assembly." Nearly four and a half decades later, slavery officially abolished, the Shreveport Times carried a brief article expressing the late-night staff's appreciation of the local black talent: "The TIMES was tendered a very pleasant serenade, which was thoroughly enjoyed, by the Johnson and Markham orchestra. This city can boast of several colored musical organizations, vocal and instrumental, and among them this orchestra, which contains some long known and excellent musicians."
   During this contradictory time when the white population enjoyed both the plantation sounds of local and itinerant black musicians and the black-face minstrel music that mocked them, when blacks were emancipated but saw some of their brothers fall victim to lynchings, when black citizens temporarily gained the right to vote but were repeatedly stereotyped as razor-carrying brutes or lackadaisical field hands, Wm. Christopher O'Hare took an interest in ragtime music, promoted it, and developed a style that has led Eric Brock, the city's best known historian today, to nickname him "the father of Ragtime in Shreveport."
O'Hare's earliest cakewalk composition, "The Cotton Pickers" (New York: Grasmuk and Schott, 1894), includes a small amount of syncopation and exhibits the touches that caused one of his future bosses to refer to O'Hare succinctly as "a composer of quaint numbers." Musicologist and ragtime scholar Edward A. Berlin has commented that the simple pentatonic melody and irregular length strains fore-shadow what we later find in both "Levee Revels" and "Plantation Pastimes."
Grasmuk and Schott copyrighted the orchestra arrangement in 1895 and the band arrangement a year later, indicating continued interest in the piece, an inference supported by the Shreveport Times: "The Cotton Pickers, published some time ago, is in the repertoire of nearly all the orchestras at the roof gardens, etc., and has been performed by bands at all of the leading watering places in the vicinity of New York." Granted, the composer's local paper might exaggerate, but the New York Evening Post asserted that John Philip Sousa, the country's leading bandmaster, figured prominently among those accepting the composition.

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