Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin was born about the twenty-fourth of November 1868 in northeast Texas, near the Texas–Arkansas border, the second of six children. His father, Giles Joplin, was a former slave from North Carolina who had played the violin for plantation gatherings and later laboured on the railroad; his mother, Florence Givens Joplin, a freeborn woman from Kentucky, sang and played the banjo and cleaned homes to support the family. From this musical household the boy drew his first education in sound.

His gift was recognised early. In Texarkana he received formal grounding from Julius Weiss, a German-born music teacher who schooled him in harmony and the European classics without charge. As a young man Joplin travelled the Mississippi valley as an itinerant pianist before settling in Sedalia, Missouri, in the 1890s, where he studied further and began to publish.

In 1899 the "Maple Leaf Rag" appeared and ignited a national craze, establishing Joplin as the pre-eminent composer of classic ragtime. Across the next decade he produced a body of rags of uncommon poise and structure — among them "The Entertainer" — insisting that ragtime be played with dignity and never too fast. His ambition reached beyond the parlour toward the concert stage and the opera house.

That ambition centred on Treemonisha, a three-act grand opera he wrote, scored, and published at his own expense in 1911, telling of a young Black woman who leads her people out of ignorance through learning. It went largely unperformed in his lifetime, and Joplin died in New York on the first of April 1917. Vindication came late: Treemonisha was staged in full in the 1970s and Joplin was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976. We honour Scott Joplin, who lifted an American music into art and whose melodies still carry his people's hope forward.