Scott Joplin

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Susan Curtis

As a pioneering African American composer of ragtime music, Scott Joplin took part in a musical revolution in America at the turn of the twentieth century and left an enduring mark on the musical culture of the country. Best known during his lifetime for Maple Leaf Rag (1899), Joplin wrote some two dozen compositions in the catchy, syncopated style that served as accompaniment to cakewalk dancing, to new forms of urban sporting life, and to a more generalized revolt against nineteenth-century gentility and restraint. He helped establish the conventional structure of ragtime compositions and successfully blended familiar genres of European music with African American rhythms and melodies into a genuine musical hybrid. After 1900, ragtime music emerged as the first nationally recognized American music, and Tin Pan Alley publishers flooded the popular sheet music market with thousands of snappy, syncopated songs and piano pieces. Hiram K. Moderwell, one of Joplin's contemporaries, called ragtime the "folk music of the American city," and John Stark, the publisher of Maple Leaf Rag, dubbed Joplin the "King of Ragtime Writers."

Although he was unquestionably born with a musical gift, Joplin's genius must be attributed at least partly to childhood influences from the region of his birth. Born near Linden, Texas, in 1868, the second son of sharecroppers Jiles and Florence Joplin, the future composer grew up amid former slaves and their rich musical traditions. As a youngster he heard black work songs, spirituals, and ring shouts, as well as the European waltzes, schottishes, and marches that black musicians like his father performed at white parties and dances. When the Joplins moved to Texarkana, which had sprung into existence in the early 1870s at the junction of the Texas & Pacific and Cairo & Fulton Railroads, Scott not only attended school but also learned to play the piano belonging to a wealthy family whose house his mother cleaned. As his talent developed, he began studying with a German music teacher (thought most probably to be Julius Weiss) from whom he learned the basic elements of serious European compositions and the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies on which they depended. Joplin began performing as an adolescent, impressing those who heard him with the originality of his music. As one contemporary later recalled, "He did not have to play anybody else's music. He made up his own, and it was beautiful; he just got his music out of the air."

It is not known exactly when Scott Joplin left Texarkana, but sometime in the 1880s he set out to make his living as an itinerant musician. It also is not known where he worked and lived before he gained fame in Sedalia, Missouri, in the 1890s. Oral histories place him at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where he tried out some of his arrangements with a newly formed band performing, no doubt, in the city's tenderloin district. He was convinced that his rhythmically daring music had a ready, eager audience. Ragtime's misplaced accents, its complex melodies that flowed from bass to treble and back, and the flurry of its notes invited toe-tapping, knee-slapping, head-bobbing movement from those who heard it; it was perfect for the flashy strutting of the popular cakewalk. Moreover, the 1890s economic depression, which affected the middle class as well as the underpaid or unemployed working class, sparked a nationwide questioning of the long-held American belief in self-denial and personal restraint. Joplin's music literally struck a chord with a generation ready to shake off the vestiges of nineteenth-century propriety by kicking up its heels to the exuberant strains of ragtime.

Following the World's Columbian Exposition, Joplin made his way to Sedalia, Missouri, an important railhead in the east-central part of the Show-Me State. More significantly, perhaps, for the black musician, Sedalia was the home of the George R. Smith College for Negroes. Joplin enrolled in music courses at the black institution and began performing in various settings in Sedalia along with other talented African American musicians, earning a reputation as a popular entertainer and composer of ragtime music. He performed with the Queen City Band, an all-black group that provided music for various public entertainments, and played in clubs, brothels, dance halls, and at private parties. He also mentored and collaborated with younger black musicians such as Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden. Marshall remembered his teacher as "a quiet person with perfect manners who loved music and liked to talk about it." He was "a brother in kindness to all."

Undoubtedly the most important association Joplin formed in Sedalia was with a white publisher of sheet music, John Stark. By the time Stark published Maple Leaf Rag in 1899, Joplin had published four other compositions--two marches, a waltz, and Original Rags. Although skeptical of the marketability of Joplin's work--he viewed the composition as too difficult for local patrons--Stark admired Maple Leaf Rag and agreed to put out a limited printing. Very quickly, orders for Joplin's rag began to pour in, and Stark issued several new editions over the next few years. Stark moved his business to St. Louis in 1900 and continued to publish Joplin works--Peacherine Rag (1901), Augustan Club Waltz (1901), A Breeze from Alabama (1902), Elite Syncopations (1902), The Entertainer (1902), and The Strenuous Life (1902). Stark also promoted Joplin's career by declaring him the "King of Ragtime Writers," by aggressively marketing his latest works, and by regularly contributing advertising copy and articles about him to the nationally circulated Christensen's Ragtime Review. Stark's business sense no doubt contributed to Joplin's decision to write The Cascades (1904) as a tribute to the attraction of that name at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. As Joplin's fame spread, he, too, moved to St. Louis, where he lived from 1901 to 1907. There he continued composing, performing, and mixing socially and professionally with such black musicians as Tom Turpin, Sam Patterson, and Joe Jordan.