| Scott Joplin (ca. 1867–April 1,
1917) remains the best-known ragtime musician and composer, setting the standard
for the many who followed.
Joplin was born near Linden, Texas to Florence Givins and Giles
(sometimes listed as "Jiles") Joplin. He was the second of six children. While for many years his date of birth was thought to be
November 24, 1868, new research by
ragtime historian Ed Berlin has revealed that this is inaccurate.
After 1871 the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Texas and Scott's mother cleaned homes so Scott could have a place to practice his music. By
1882 his mother had purchased a piano. Showing musical ability at an early age, the young
Joplin received piano lessons for free from a German music teacher, who gave him a well-rounded knowledge of classical music
form. This is something that would serve him well in later years, and fuel his ambition to create a "classical" form of ragtime.
He would later further his musical education by attending the George Smith College in Sedalia, studying composition.
By the late 1880s Joplin had left home to start a life of his own. He may have joined
or formed various quartets and other musical groups and travelled around the midwest to sing. What is known is that he was part
of a minstel troupe in Texarkana around 1891. In 1895, Joplin was in Syracuse, New York, selling two songs, Please Say You Will and A Picture of Her Face.
But despite all this travelling, his home base was in Sedalia,
Missouri where he moved in 1894, working as a pianist in the Maple Leaf and Black 400
clubs, both social black clubs for respectable gentlemen.
By 1898 Joplin had sold six pieces for the piano, most very advanced tunes that were
fine musically, but not anything special. Of the six, only Original Rags is a ragtime piece. The other five were two songs
(mentioned previously), two marches, and a waltz.
In 1899, Joplin sold his most famous piece, Maple Leaf Rag to John Stark &
Son, a Sedalia, Missouri, music publisher. Joplin received a one-cent royalty for each copy and ten free copies for his own
use. It has been estimated that Joplin made $360 per year on this piece in his lifetime.
Maple Leaf Rag boosted Joplin to the top of the list of ragtime performers and moved ragtime into prominence as a
musical form.
Joplin had several marriages. Perhaps his dearest love, Freddie Alexander, died at age twenty just two months after they
married, of complications resulting from a cold. The first work copyrighted after Freddie's death, Bethena (1905), is a
very sad, musically complex ragtime waltz.
After some months of faltering, Joplin continued writing and publishing, and in those days before recorded music was a
best-selling composer based on sales of sheet music. Joplin continued to experiment with other musical forms as well; after
moving to New York City, Joplin attempted an ambitious ragtime opera, Treemonisha, which he produced himself at great personal expense. It was performed
only once during his lifetime, in 1915. The score to an earlier ragtime opera by Joplin,
A Guest of Honor, is lost.
Joplin wanted to experiment further with compositions like Treemonisha, but by 1916 he was suffering from the effects of terminal syphilis. He suffered
later from dementia, paranoia,
paralysis and other symptoms. Despite this, he recorded six piano rolls that
year — Maple Leaf Rag (for Connorized and Uni-Record labels), Something Doing, Magnetic Rag, Ole Miss Rag, and Pleasant
Moments (all for Connorized). These are the only records of his playing we have, and are interesting for the embellishments added
by Joplin to his performances. A surviving copy of the 'Pleasant Moments' roll has not yet been discovered. It has been claimed
that the uneven nature of some of Joplin's piano rolls, such as one of the recordings of the Maple Leaf Rag mentioned above,
documented the extent of Joplin's physical deterioration due to syphilis. However, the irregularities are just as likely due to
the primitive technology used to record the rolls.
In mid-January 1917 Joplin was hospitalized at Manhattan State
Hospital in New York City, and friends recounted that he would have
bursts of lucidity in which he would jot down lines of music hurriedly before relapsing. Joplin died there on April 1, 1917. His death did not make the headlines for
two reasons: ragtime was quickly losing ground to jazz and the United States would enter
World War I within days. He was buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in the
Astoria section of Queens.
Joplin's musical papers, including unpublished manuscripts, were willed to Joplin's friend and the executor of his will,
musician and composer Wilber Sweatman. Sweatman took care of these
papers and generously shared access to them to those who enquired. However these were unfortunately few, since Joplin's music had
come to be considered passé. After Sweatman's death in 1961 the papers were last known to
go into storage during a legal battle among Sweatman's heirs; their current location is not known, nor even if they still
exist.
There was, however, an important find in 1971 — a piano-roll copy of the lost
"Silver Swan Rag," cut sometime around 1914. It had not been published in sheet-music form
in Joplin's lifetime. Before this, his only posthumously published piece had been "Reflection Rag", put together by Stark in
1917 from fragments of Joplin melodies in Stark's archives.
After Joplin's death ragtime music experienced two bursts of popularity. The first was in the early 1950s when ragtime was regarded as a happy nostalgic music of a more innocent time. The second ragtime revival
was prompted by the release of the movie The Sting in 1973, which despite being set in the 1930s still anachronistically
featured a Joplin soundtrack and introduced new generations to his music. Marvin Hamlisch's adaptation of the Joplin song "The
Entertainer" reached number 3 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100
music chart in 1974, and a much wider and deeper interest in ragtime in general and Joplin
in particular was created. In 1974 Kenneth MacMillan created a ballet for the Royal Ballet, Elite Syncopations, based on tunes by
Joplin, Max Morath and others. It is still performed occasionally.
Joplin's music
- Antoinette (1906)
- Augustan Club Waltz (1901)
- Bethena (1905)
- Binks' Waltz (1905)
- A Breeze From Alabama (1902)
- Cascades (1904)
- The Chrysanthemum (1904) dedicated to Freddie Alexander, Joplin's second wife.
- Cleopha (1902)
- Combination March (1896)
- Country Club (1909)
- The Great Crush Collision March (1896)
- The Easy Winners (1901)
- Elite Syncopations (1902)
- The Entertainer (1902)
- Eugenia (1906)
- Euphonic Sounds (1909)
- The Favorite (1904)
- Felicity Rag (1911) with Scott Hayden
- Fig Leaf Rag (1908)
- Gladiolus Rag (1907)
- Harmony Club Waltz (1896)
- Heliotrope Bouquet (1907) with Louis Chauvin
- I Am Thinking of My Pickanniny Days (1902) lyrics by Henry Jackson
- Kismet Rag (1913) with Scott Hayden
- Leola (1905)
- Lily Queen (1907) with Arthur Marshall
- Little Black Baby (1903) lyrics by Louis Armstrong Bristol
- Magnetic Rag (1914)
- Maple Leaf Rag (1899)
- March Majestic (1902)
- The Nonpareil (1907)
- Original Rags (1899) arranged by Chas. N. Daniels
- Palm Leaf Rag (1903)
- Paragon Rag (1909)
- Peacherine Rag (1901)
- A Picture of Her Face (1895)
- Pine Apple Rag (1908)
- Pleasant Moments (1909)
- Please Say You Will (1895)
- The Ragtime Dance (1902)
- The Ragtime Dance (1906) this version was shortened and published to recoup losses from the 1902 version.
- Reflection Rag (1917) posthumous publication
- The Rose-bud March (1905)
- Rose Leaf Rag (1907)
- Sarah Dear (1905) lyrics by Henry Jackson
- School of Ragtime (1908)
- Searchlight Rag (1907)
- Silver Swan Rag (1971) posthumous publication
- Solace (1909)
- Something Doing (1903) with Scott Hayden
- Stoptime Rag (1910)
- The Strenuous Life (1902)
- Sugar Cane (1908)
- Sunflower Slow Drag (1901) with Scott Hayden
- Swipsey (1900) with Arthur Marshall
- The Sycamore (1904)
- Treemonisha (1911)
- Wall Street Rag (1909)
- Weeping Willow (1903)
- When Your Hair Is Like the Snow (1907) lyrics by "Owen Spendthrift"
Samples
Further reading
Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (ISBN 0195101081) — the most authoritative
book on Joplin's life.
External links
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