Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin earned the title "the King of Ragtime Writers" by transforming "banjo piano playing," a form of entertainment long linked to saloons and brothels, into a widely admired American musical style. He entered the world in Texas in 1867 or 1868 and spent his early years in Texarkana as the child of a laborer who had once been enslaved. During childhood he learned piano on an instrument made available by another household and later received instruction from a German-born teacher in the area who exposed him to classical repertoire. He completed high school in Sedalia, Missouri, the city that later functioned as his primary base during his most successful period and that would eventually host a museum named in his honor.

The earliest documented trace of his professional activity dates to 1891, when he performed with a minstrel troupe in Texarkana. The following year he appeared in Chicago during the Columbian Exposition, reportedly directing an ensemble on cornet. He then established himself in Sedalia, collaborated with several brass bands, and organized the vocal ensemble known as the Texas Medley Quartette. While the group performed in Syracuse, New York, in 1895, local businessmen were sufficiently impressed by the original material Joplin had written for the quartet to finance his initial printed works. Around 1896 he entered Sedalia’s historically Black George R. Smith College for formal study and continued to issue occasional compositions in the ensuing years.

In 1899 Sedalia publisher John Stark released Joplin’s second ragtime piece, “Maple Leaf Rag.” Although sales began slowly, the work eventually achieved enormous popularity that established Joplin’s reputation; he received a modest royalty from it for the remainder of his life, providing financial stability in his final years. Late in 1899 he staged his first large-scale composition, the ballet The Ragtime Dance, at the Wood Opera House in Sedalia. The score did not reach print until 1902, and then only in shortened form. Joplin relocated to St. Louis in 1901, followed by Stark, who launched his new firm under the name “The House of Classic Rags.” During this period Joplin produced several of his best-known rags, among them “The Entertainer,” “The Easy Winners,” and “Elite Syncopations.”

In 1903 Joplin assembled a touring company for his first opera, A Guest of Honor, but the venture collapsed after a few months and left him penniless. He recovered sufficiently to perform his rag “The Cascades” at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where it became his second major success. He also entered a second marriage; his bride succumbed to pneumonia only weeks later, returning him to despondency. While visiting Chicago in 1907 he reconnected with the St. Louis pianist Louis Chauvin, who died shortly afterward. Joplin incorporated a melodic strain from Chauvin’s playing into the finest of his collaborative rags, “Heliotrope Bouquet,” issued after his own move to New York later that year. Stark likewise settled in the city and resumed their association on a limited basis, yet Joplin also placed works with Seminary Music, the same firm that published aspiring songwriter Irving Berlin. Through Seminary appeared many of his strongest later pieces, including “Pine Apple Rag,” the “Mexican serenade” “Solace,” and the harmonically adventurous “Euphonic Sounds.”

Between 1911 and his death in 1917 the greater part of Joplin’s energy went into his second opera, Treemonisha, which received a concert hearing but never reached the stage in his lifetime. With his third wife, Lotte Joplin, he established his own publishing company and issued his final piano rag, “Magnetic Rag” (1914), regarded as one of his finest. Advanced effects of long-standing syphilis had already begun to impair his health, though he still managed to record seven hand-played piano rolls in 1916 and 1917; despite heavy editing, these rolls remain the nearest surviving approximation of his own performance. One of them features W.C. Handy’s “Ole Miss Rag,” hinting at possible involvement by Joplin in its composition or arrangement. Throughout his career he championed fellow ragtime composers with notable generosity, collaborating with James Scott, Arthur Marshall, Louis Chauvin, and Scott Hayden while also facilitating publication for Artie Matthews and the New Jersey composer Joseph Lamb, whose music Joplin brought to Stark’s attention.

“Maple Leaf Rag” continued to circulate widely during the Jazz Age, yet most of Joplin’s output stayed obscure until the ragtime revival of the early 1970s, when “Scott Joplin” entered common parlance and Treemonisha finally received a full production by the Houston Grand Opera. Although primary sources for his music still existed as late as the 1940s, not a single manuscript page in his handwriting survived by the end of the century, and only three photographs of him remained, accompanied by scant firsthand quotations. Joplin died in a mental institution convinced he had failed to establish himself as a Black composer of serious music. Had he lived to the present, he would likely have been astonished to discover that, a century after his first publications, he stands as the most successful African American composer of serious music in history—and by a wide margin. Individual works have been recorded hundreds of times and transcribed for nearly every instrumental medium, ranging from symphony orchestras to ice cream trucks.