Artist Profile: Ragtime Composer Scott Joplin

Because of the enduring popularity of his compositions "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer," composer Scott Joplin is the most famous of the ragtime composers, and was one of the first early African-American composers to gain national recognition.

Joplin published several ragtime piano compositions, or “rags,” from 1898 to 1914, and also wrote several operas, ballets, marches, and waltzes. Ragtime preceded jazz, which eventually supplanted it as the dominant popular music by 1917, the year of Joplin’s death.Some of ragtime’s fundamental characteristics, including syncopation, rhythmic anticipations,and melodies

that fell slightly behind the accompaniment’s march-like two-beat pattern, were adopted by early jazz musicians.

There is no record of Joplin’s birth, but according to Joplin scholar Edwin A. Berlin, it was either in 1867 or 1868. As a young boy, Joplin moved with his family to Texarkana, Texas. There he was able to learn the piano by playing on the one owned by his mother’s bosses, a white family that employed her as a domestic worker. This story shows up in Joplin’s most ambitious work, an 1910 opera entitled Treemonisha, in which the heroine gets musical training through her mother’s employers.

In Texarkana Joplin was given extra musical instruction by a German-born teacher named Julius Weiss, who taught him about the European musical tradition, and perhaps planted in Joplin the desire to become a classical composer. This he pursued with only modest success until the end of his life. Joplin published his first song in Chicago in 1895, his first piano rag, "Original Rags," in 1898 and his most famous tune, "Maple Leaf Rag," in 1899. He secured a one-cent royalty from each sale of this piece, and this modest income supported him for the rest of his life.

In 1903, Joplin formed an opera company to perform Guest of Honor on a tour through the Midwest. Early on, a member of the company stole the box office receipts, and as a result the tour folded and the company went bankrupt. The piece was lost when all of Joplin's possessions were confiscated to meet his financial obligations. According to newspaper stories from the time, the opera told the story of the meeting between president Roosevelt and black leader Booker T. Washington, a highly controversial event at the time.

The ill-fated piece was an early attempt to celebrate the efforts of African-American civil rights leaders through music. Fortunately, Treemonisha, a later work that also deals seriously with African-American characters negotiating a segregated world, did survive. Although it was never staged in Joplin's lifetime, contemporary opera companies perform it with some frequency. Many other African-American musicians have since contributed their own works to this cause, such as Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige and Sonny Rollins' Freedom Suite.

Although ragtime fell out of fashion when jazz came around, several pianists have championed and recorded his music. Pianist Joshua Rifkin is credited with rekindling interest in Joplin's rags in the 1970s. This led to the first full production of Treemonisha, which was staged for the first time in Atlanta in 1972. Joplin's music was adapted for use in the score of the 1973 movie The Sting, and a version of "The Entertainer" from the soundtrack went to number three on the Billboard pop charts. Since then, Joplin's place in the canon of American music has been assured. For a more thorough examination of Joplin's life and work visit Edwin A. Berlin's "A Biography of Scott Joplin". His essay on Joplin's work was an important source for this article.