1868–1917 · United States · 20th century
Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was an American composer and pianist who wrote 44 ragtime pieces, among them "The Entertainer" and the "Maple Leaf Rag". He is regarded as the leading composer of the genre, though recognition came to him only after his death. The site's collection features his piano solo pieces at upper intermediate to advanced level.
Not much is known in detail about Scott Joplin's earliest years. He came into the world in Texas in 1868, one of six children — the second-born — in the family of Giles Joplin, who came from North Carolina, and Florence Givens, who came from Kentucky. Before the family settled in Texarkana, where his father found work on the railroad and his mother as a cleaner, they moved several times looking for a better life.
Scott showed musical gifts early and by the age of seven he already played the piano well. Music ran in the family too: his father had once played the violin, and his mother enjoyed singing and playing the banjo.
One of Joplin's schoolteachers was Julius Weiss, a German-born music professor. Impressed by the boy's talent and aware of his family's difficult situation, Weiss taught him free of charge. From 1878 to 1883 Weiss introduced Scott to folk music, classical works and opera, and also helped the family acquire a used piano.
According to Joplin's wife, he never forgot the man who first opened the door to music for him: once he had won recognition as a composer, he helped Weiss with money.
Joplin made his debut at 16, alongside three other young men from Texarkana, in a quartet. In the late 1880s he gave up the idea of becoming a railroad worker and began earning his living as a travelling musician. Little is known about these years: a July 1891 record places him among the Texarkana Minstrels, a group then collecting funds for a monument honouring Jefferson Davis.
A black pianist had few opportunities to make a name for himself: he mostly had to play in churches and brothels. At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, Joplin formed his first full band, which played the cornet. The fair drew 27 million visitors and affected the spread of ragtime: by 1897 the genre had become widely known.
Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894; at first the Marshall family took him in, and their thirteen-year-old son Arthur eventually began composing ragtimes himself after studying with Joplin. Joplin gave music lessons, and his students included the future recognised composers Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. Some accounts say he studied at the George R. Smith College, but the college's archive was destroyed in a 1925 fire, and biographer Edward Berlin doubts that a small school for African Americans could have offered such a course at all.
In 1895, two of Joplin's earliest works reached print: the song "Please Say You Will", followed by "A Picture of Her Face". A trip to Temple, Texas, a year later led to several more publications, among them the march "Crush Collision March": it was written for a staged train wreck that the composer may have witnessed with his own eyes. Then in 1897 came Joplin's first genuine ragtime piece, "Original Rags".
On August 10, 1899, Joplin reached an agreement with music-instrument dealer John Stillwell Stark, who became the composer's chief publisher. Under the deal, Joplin was to receive a one-percent share on every copy of the "Maple Leaf Rag" sold at 25 cents or more; the piece came out that same year.
After the move to St. Louis, Joplin and his first wife Belle had a daughter, who died a few months later. Their marriage was strained by Belle's indifference to music, and the couple eventually divorced. Despite these personal losses, it was during this period that Joplin wrote some of his best-known works — "The Entertainer", "March Majestic" and "The Ragtime Dance".
In June 1904 Joplin's wife became nineteen-year-old Freddie Alexander, to whom he had dedicated the piece "The Chrysanthemum". Freddie died on September 10, 1904, of complications from a cold. The first piece Joplin wrote after this loss was "Bethena", a concert waltz.
Later Joplin put together a troupe of thirty musicians and staged his first ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor. No record survives of how many performances there were or how audiences received it.
Joplin moved to New York in 1907, hoping to find a producer there for his new opera. There he met Lottie Stokes and married her in 1909. Having failed to find a publisher, in 1911 he brought out Treemonisha at his own expense — in a lighter version, for piano and voice only.
In 1915 Joplin arranged a showing of the opera at a rehearsal hall in Harlem. The audience received the staging coldly, and many left in the middle of numbers. After this failure Joplin was left without means.
Joplin had syphilis, and by 1916 the disease had progressed to a chronic stage — signs of dementia appeared. In January 1917 the composer was placed in a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan. He died there on April 1 of that year, of syphilitic encephalopathy — dementia.
Joplin was buried in an unmarked grave in a pauper's cemetery — it went without a marker for 57 years. Only in 1974 did a headstone bearing the composer's name appear on the site, at St. Michael's Cemetery in New York, in the East Elmhurst neighbourhood.
Joplin and his successors gave a new sound to American popular music: syncopated, rhythmic ragtime captured the energy of the cities of the day and appealed to their residents. Joshua Rifkin noted that lyricism runs through all of Joplin's work, and that even his liveliest ragtimes carry a touch of melancholy, which set his style apart from the music of later composers in the genre. Historian Bill Ryerson compared Joplin's place in ragtime to Chopin's place in the mazurka: his melodies combined the torment and beauty of a serenade with echoes of the bolero and the tango. According to biographer Susan Curtis, this music helped free American culture from Victorian stiffness.
During the composer's lifetime, many of his works never matched the success of the "Maple Leaf Rag": according to composer and actor Max Morath, the growing lyrical refinement and complex syncopation of his later pieces went unappreciated by audiences. As one of the first black composers to write both popular and classical music, Joplin paved the way for those who came after him.
After Joplin's death, interest in ragtime faded as jazz took its place, though musicians such as Tommy Dorsey and Jelly Roll Morton kept recording his pieces. A real revival began in the late 1960s, when conductor and musicologist Joshua Rifkin took up Joplin's work: in 1970 his album of Joplin's piano ragtimes sold more than a million copies. In 1971 New York Times critic Harold Schonberg publicly called on scholars to take Joplin's legacy seriously — and much of musicologists' interest in his work grew from that call.
The site's collection includes all fifteen of Joplin's piano solo pieces. Four of them are at upper intermediate level: "Elite Syncopations", "The Strenuous Life", "Magnetic Rag" and "Wall Street Rag" — a good place to start getting to know his style. The remaining eleven are at advanced level: "Pineapple Rag", "A Breeze From Alabama", "Maple Leaf Rag", "Original Rags", "Peacherine Rag", "Search-Light Rag", "Something Doing", "Sugar Cane", "Sun Flower Slow Drag", "The Easy Winners" and "The Entertainer". It's best to begin with the upper intermediate pieces, and "Pineapple Rag" can serve as a first step into the advanced repertoire.