Jim started recording his own audiocassettes/CDs in 1998, getting the idea from- you guessed it- messing around at a practice session in March of that year at Broadway United Methodist Church in Council Bluffs, IA, where, at that time, he was in the Soul Jam Band, the group that played during the church's Sunday night worship service, Spirited Soul Cafe (later known as Evening Worship). After successfully playing "Amazing Grace" as a rag a week later (and after thinking about a 1995 request a fan made at that year's World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest), Jim set out to make his first recording, "Come Rejoicing!" The tape/CD, which included "Amazing Grace," was released in February 1999.
He started writing his own rags, too, early in 1999; that year, Jim started entering one of the newest events at the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest: A competition involving newly-written rags. After weighing in that May with "Split Brains," Jim went on to write twenty more rags over the next eight years.
Jim Boston added the title of festival organizer to his resume in 2005, when he helped get the first annual Ragtime to Riches Festival going at Broadway UMC. (The festival's name came from a local ragtime enthusiast, Mark Manhart, who cofounded an Omaha playhouse known as the Grande Olde Players Theater. Jim liked the name better than the one he thought up: Rags and More.) R to R was going to be held at the GOPT...except circumstances prevented its launching at the playhouse. And that's how the Council Bluffs church came to the rescue. When Broadway UMC came aboard, Jim decided to pattern R to R after the Eau Claire Ragtime Festival, an event held each January in that Wisconsin city. (Proceeds from that celebration go to a different nonprofit organization in Western Wisconsin each year.) In 2007, the festival found a new home: The Strauss Performing Arts Center, on the main campus of the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
All in all, Jim continues to seek to grow as a ragtime performer, composer, and festival organizer: "I just want to get to the point where Scott Joplin won't turn over in his grave when I do one of his rags."
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