Scott Joplin

Anyone asking who was Scott Joplin usually begins in northeast Texas. Joplin was born on March 31, 1868, and grew up in Texarkana, a railroad town straddling the Texas and Arkansas line, though surviving records leave some doubt about the exact year and place of his birth ^[1]. His father, Giles Joplin, had been enslaved in North Carolina before emancipation and worked as a laborer for the railroad. His mother, Florence Givens, was a freeborn woman from Kentucky who cleaned houses to help support six children ^[2].

Music filled the household. Giles had played violin at plantation gatherings, Florence sang and played the banjo, and the young Scott picked out melodies on pianos in the homes where his mother worked ^[1]. His obvious gift attracted the attention of Julius Weiss, a German-born music teacher living in Texarkana, who gave the boy free lessons in piano, sight reading, and the fundamentals of European harmony. Weiss also introduced him to opera, an enthusiasm that never left him ^[1].

By his teenage years Joplin had decided on a musician's life, a risky choice for a Black man in the post-Reconstruction South. He left home and worked as an itinerant pianist, playing in churches, minstrel troupes, and the saloons and social clubs that offered steady wages to skilled performers across the Mississippi Valley ^[2].

Joplin's travels in the late 1880s and early 1890s brought him into contact with the syncopated dance music then developing among Black pianists in the Midwest. In 1893 he reportedly worked in the entertainment districts surrounding the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where musicians from across the country traded the rhythmic ideas that would soon be called ragtime ^[1].

In 1894 he settled in Sedalia, Missouri, a railroad hub with an active Black musical community. There he played cornet in the Queen City Cornet Band, toured with his own vocal group, the Texas Medley Quartette, and taught younger pianists, including Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden, who later became his collaborators ^[3]. He also studied harmony and composition at George R. Smith College, a school for African American students in Sedalia, sharpening the formal skills that set his published work apart ^[2].

His first publications, two songs issued in 1895 and a handful of piano pieces, gave little hint of what followed. The turning point came in 1899, when Sedalia music dealer John Stark published Maple Leaf Rag, named for a local social club where Joplin performed. Stark offered a royalty of one cent per copy sold, an unusual arrangement for the time that gave Joplin a modest but steady income for the rest of his life as the sheet music eventually sold in the hundreds of thousands ^[1].

Any list of Scott Joplin achievements starts with Maple Leaf Rag. Its four strains, built on driving left-hand patterns beneath intricate syncopation, became the model that hundreds of later rags imitated. Joplin insisted that ragtime deserved the same care as classical music, marking his scores with the warning that ragtime should never be played fast ^[4].

After moving to St. Louis in 1901, he produced the works that define the classic rag repertoire: The Entertainer, Elite Syncopations, and The Easy Winners appeared in 1901 and 1902, followed over the next decade by pieces such as The Cascades, written for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and the reflective Solace, one of his few works in a habanera rhythm ^[2]. In 1908 he published School of Ragtime, a set of exercises explaining how to perform syncopation correctly, evidence of his ambition to codify the style he had helped create ^[1].

Joplin's ambitions reached beyond the piano miniature. He wrote a ballet score, The Ragtime Dance, in 1899, and in 1903 mounted a touring production of his first opera, A Guest of Honor, which collapsed when box office receipts were stolen on the road; the score has never been found ^[1]. His second opera, Treemonisha, completed around 1910, told the story of a young Black woman in rural Arkansas who leads her community away from superstition toward education. Unable to interest a publisher, Joplin issued the 230-page vocal score at his own expense in 1911, and a single under-rehearsed run-through in Harlem in 1915, performed without orchestra or staging, failed to attract backers ^[5].

Joplin married three times. His first marriage, to Belle Hayden, a widowed relative by marriage of his collaborator Scott Hayden, took place around 1899 in Sedalia. The couple lost an infant daughter, and the marriage dissolved in the early 1900s ^[1].

In June 1904 he married Freddie Alexander of Little Rock, Arkansas, a young woman to whom he had dedicated his rag The Chrysanthemum. She fell ill shortly after the wedding and died of pneumonia that September, only ten weeks into the marriage. Biographers have connected the sorrow of that loss to the darker coloring of several later works ^[1].

Around 1907 Joplin moved to New York City, where he met Lottie Stokes, whom he married in 1909. Lottie managed their boarding house on West 47th Street and later in Harlem, supported his work on Treemonisha, and preserved many of his manuscripts after his death ^[5]. Those who knew Joplin described a serious, soft-spoken man, more comfortable composing and teaching than performing, who read widely and held firm views about education as the route to advancement for Black Americans ^[2].

The New York years brought professional frustration. Ragtime remained commercially popular, but the market favored simpler novelty numbers over Joplin's demanding scores, and Tin Pan Alley publishers showed no appetite for a full-length opera by a Black composer ^[5]. He continued to publish rags of remarkable refinement, including Wall Street Rag in 1909 and Magnetic Rag in 1914, the last piece issued in his lifetime, which he brought out under his own imprint ^[1].

His health was failing. Joplin suffered from the advancing effects of syphilis, which by 1916 had impaired his coordination, memory, and speech to the point that he could no longer play reliably. A handful of piano rolls he cut that year, including a halting performance of Maple Leaf Rag, document his decline ^[1].

In early 1917 Lottie had him admitted to Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island, where he died on April 1, 1917, one day after his forty-ninth birthday as conventionally reckoned. He was buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in East Elmhurst, Queens, in a grave that remained unmarked for more than five decades ^[2].

For most of the half century after his death, Joplin survived mainly as a name in histories of early jazz. The 1950 study They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, drawing on interviews with Lottie Joplin and surviving colleagues, kept his story alive for later researchers ^[6].

The revival arrived suddenly. In 1970 musicologist Joshua Rifkin recorded an album of Joplin rags played as concert music, and it became an unexpected bestseller. Three years later the film The Sting used The Entertainer as its main theme, and Marvin Hamlisch's adaptation reached the top of the American pop charts in 1974, introducing Joplin's melodies to tens of millions of listeners ^[2]. Treemonisha finally received full stagings, first in Atlanta in 1972 and then in a celebrated Houston Grand Opera production in 1975 that transferred to Broadway ^[5].

Formal honors followed. In 1976 the Pulitzer Prize board awarded Joplin a posthumous special citation for his contributions to American music ^[7]. His St. Louis home is preserved as the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site, the only Missouri state historic site devoted to an African American ^[8]. Among the most striking Scott Joplin facts is how completely his reputation reversed: the composer who could not get his opera produced is now studied in conservatories, and any serious Scott Joplin biography treats him not as a saloon entertainer but as one of the first great American composers ^[1].