honky tonk tuning

[Carl Teplitski]

For some time now, I've been thinking of sending this post
to the list , to see if there was a definitive answer . I've
procrastinated,
because I thought it might be a dumb question.  What I would like to
know,
is this. Is the tuning we hear on Rag- Time recordings, a special
tuning, or
just a piano which happens to be badly out of tune. I know of course
that
many pianos badly out of tune, sound like this, but on these recordings,
they
seem to be quite consistent across the keyboard, which leads me to
believe that
this piano was tuned exactly for this particular recording.  What I'm
trying to say is
that the piano sounds like the out of tuneness seems to be very even
thru - out.
If in fact my suspicions are correct, I would be interested in knowing
what the
tuning looked like on paper, ( like E.T. , or some of the other tunings
).
For instance, how the beats were arrived at.

Carl / Winnipeg.