by
Susan Robinson
Scott Joplin
circa 1867-1917
Ragtime was a precursor of jazz, and Scott Joplin was its most successful composer. Scott Joplin was one of the first African Americans to become famous and successful composer of popular music. He is known as the King of Ragtime.
Scott Joplin was born around 1867 or 1868 in Texas. He was the second of six children. His father, Jiles, was a farm laborer and his mother, Florence, worked as a domestic. His family was a musical one: Jiles Joplin played the violin, and Florence played the banjo and sang. Around 1871 the family moved to Texarkana, Texas, where young Scott was given access to a piano in a house where his mother worked. He began to learn to play on his own, until his talent came to the attention of a German-American music teacher, Julius Weiss, who provided Scott with further training in classical music forms. By 1882, Scott's mother had purchased a piano for him to practice on at home.
In the 1880s Scott lived for a time in Sedalia, Missouri, attending a Black high school. He went on to St. Louis, possibly to begin his career in music, although this is not confirmed. It is known that in 1891 he had returned to Texarkana and joined a troupe of minstrels, a popular form of entertainment in those days. He traveled around the Midwest performing with various musical groups. At the time of the World's Fair in Chicago, he may have been a cornet player in a band there. After the Fair, Joplin returned to Sedalia and joined a cornet band, remaining with them for about a year before forming his own band. With Sedalia as a base, the band traveled around playing at dances and other events. Joplin was also employed as a piano player at two respectable social clubs in Sedalia for African American men: the Black 400 Club and the Maple Leaf Club. It is believed that he attended George Smith College in Sedalia, but the institution' s records were lost in a fire in the 1920s so his course of study cannot be verified. In 1895 Joplin's vocal group, the Texas Medley Quartette, performed in Syracuse, New York. His first two songs were published in Syracuse. They were not in the ragtime style for which Joplin later became famous. By 1898 he had published six pieces, including his first rag, Original Rags. The publisher insisted on including credit for a staff arranger, Charles Daniels. Joplin was not happy about this, and consulted a lawyer before publishing his next works.
John Stark, a Sedalia publisher and music store owner, published Joplin's most famous piece, the Map/e Leaf Rag, in 1899. It was the beginning of a business relationship that lasted many years. Joplin received a royalty of one cent per copy sold, which in those days was considered a fairly good deal. In those days it was common for White publishers to take advantage of African American composers, paying them only a one-time sum of ten or twenty dollars, so that even if their works became a hit, they would not receive royalties and continue to benefit financially. Map/e Leaf Rag gained gradually in popularity after its first year of publication, eventually providing Joplin with about $360 a year in royalties for the rest of his life. During his career as a composer, Joplin wrote dozens of successful piano rags, marches, and waltzes. The style of music he wrote was extremely popular, and was played in every bar and nightclub around the country, either by live pianists or on mechanical "player pianos" which played songs recorded on piano rolls.
Throughout his life, Scott Joplin's wish to be regarded as a serious composer was a driving force. Soon after the publication of Maple Leaf Rag, he finished a work called the Ragtime Dance, written as a stage performance which included dance steps and a singing narrator. It was performed at Wood's Opera House in Sedalia, by members of the Black 400 Club. As a commercial venture, the Ragtime Dance failed. Later in his career, he undertook even more innovative projects including two operas, A Guest of Honor, which has been lost, and Treemonisha. A Guest of Honor was about Booker T. Washington's dinner at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt. A Guest of Honor was performed in five states, but the box office receipts were stolen and many possessions of Joplin's as well as all existing copies of the opera score were confiscated by creditors. Treemonisha, the next opera, told the story of an African American woman who becomes educated and leads her townspeople out of ignorance and superstition and into racial equality. Some of it was clearly intended to be a tribute to his mother, whose hard work and encouragement had allowed Joplin to advance his musical education. This opera failed financially also, apparently because it was ahead of its time.
In the 1970s a huge revival of interest in Joplin's music occurred when the hit movie The Sting, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, featured such Joplin classics as Pineapple Rag, The Entertainer, The Easy Winners, and Solace. The movie won awards for the best music. Classical music performers and record labels began to promote Joplin's music and he finally received the critical and scholarly acclaim that had eluded him during his lifetime. Treemonisha was subsequently revived and performed and was a rousing success. In 1976 Scott Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his life's work.
Joplin was described as a quiet, serious person. He was married three times. He and his first wife broke up after the death of their child. His second wife was only twenty years old when she caught a cold that developed into pneumonia, killing her only ten weeks into their marriage. Unfortunately, some time during his early years working as a musician in the red-light districts of various cities, he contracted syphilis. Syphilis has a long incubation period, but in Joplin's later days his coordination and piano-playing abilities suffered from the degenerative symptoms of the disease, and in its final stages, insanity ensued. Joplin suffered what was described as a "nervous breakdown" in 1916 and was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital in New York, where he died the next year, at the age of 49. He had been virtually forgotten, as jazz was already taking ragtime's place as the popular music of the day.
Scott Joplin lived a productive, yet tragic life. Since the revival of the popularity of his music in the 1970s, his accomplishments have been recognized by the musical community as being an integral part of the history of American music. There are countless die-hard aficionados of Scott Joplin's ragtime, as is apparent when you go on the Internet and see how many people allover the world have posted recordings of themselves playing Joplin's works. Here are a couple of links to good sites where you can hear full-length recordings of many classic rags: Click here or here or here.
Make sure you hear Solace--it is this author's favorite Joplin piece. Not to be left out of the action, I have included a short recording of me playing the first movement of the Maple Leaf Rag.
by
Susan Robinson
