Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin was born on the twenty-fourth of November 1868 in north-east Texas, the second of six children of Giles Joplin — a former Caddo Parish, Louisiana slave and railroad labourer — and Florence Givens Joplin, a free-born Black domestic worker. The family settled at Texarkana on the Texas-Arkansas line in 1875, where his mother cleaned for white households in exchange for after-hours access to their pianos.

He was placed at eleven under the tuition of the German émigré pianist Julius Weiss, who taught him European art-music harmony, sight-reading, and the operatic repertoire at no charge across four years. He left Texarkana at fourteen in 1882 and worked the saloon-piano circuit of Texas, Louisiana and Missouri across the following decade.

He settled at Sedalia, Missouri in 1894 and enrolled at the Lincoln High School of Sedalia for additional theory. He published in 1899 the Maple Leaf Rag through the Sedalia music publisher John Stark — the principal commercial sheet-music success of the early classical-ragtime period and the work that established Joplin as the leading composer of the genre.

He published forty-four piano rags between 1899 and 1917 — among them The Entertainer (1902), The Easy Winners (1901), and the Solace Mexican serenade (1909) — and a ragtime ballet, The Ragtime Dance (1902), a one-act opera, A Guest of Honor (1903, lost), and the three-act grand opera Treemonisha (1911).

He self-published Treemonisha in 1911 at his own expense after no commercial publisher would take it, and mounted in 1915 a single unstaged read-through at the Lincoln Theatre at Harlem.

He died at the Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island on the first of April 1917 of tertiary syphilitic dementia, at forty-eight. Treemonisha received its first full staged production fifty-five years later, in 1972, at Atlanta.

He is honored here as the principal composer of classical ragtime.