Scott Joplin (November 24, 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Dubbed the "King of Ragtime", he composed more than 40 ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet (original version of "The Ragtime Dance", 1899/1902), and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became the genre's first and most influential hit, later being recognized as the quintessential rag. Joplin considered ragtime to be a form of classical music meant to be played in concert halls and largely disdained the performance of ragtime as honky tonk music most common in saloons.
Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Texas. During the late 1880s, he traveled the American South as a musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which helped make ragtime a national craze by 1897. Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894 and worked as a piano teacher. He began publishing music in 1895, and his "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 brought him fame and a steady income. In 1901, Joplin moved to St. Louis and two years later scored his first opera, A Guest of Honor. It was confiscated—along with his belongings—for non-payment of bills and is now considered lost. In 1907, Joplin moved to New York City to (unsuccessfully) find a producer for a new opera. In 1916, Joplin descended into dementia from neurosyphilis. His 1917 death marks the end of the "Ragtime era".
Joplin's music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of a million-selling album, Scott Joplin: Piano Rags, recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award–winning 1973 film The Sting, which features several of Joplin's compositions. Treemonisha, his second opera, was produced in 1972; and, in 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Joplin was the second of six children born to Giles Joplin, a former slave from North Carolina, and Florence Givens, a freeborn African-American woman from Kentucky. His birth date was accepted by early biographers Rudi Blesh and James Haskins as November 24, 1868, although later biographer Edward A. Berlin showed this was most likely incorrect and that he was likely born between June 1867 and mid-January 1868. There is disagreement over his exact place of birth in Texas, with Blesh identifying Texarkana, and Berlin showing the earliest record of Joplin being the June 1870 census which locates him as a two-year-old in Linden (about 40 miles from Texarkana).
By 1880, the Joplins had moved to Texarkana, Arkansas, where Giles worked as a railroad laborer and Florence as a cleaner. As Joplin's father had played the violin for plantation parties in North Carolina and his mother sang and played the banjo, Joplin was given a rudimentary musical education by his family, and from the age of seven he was allowed to play the piano while his mother cleaned.
At some point in the early 1880s, Giles Joplin left the family for another woman and Florence struggled to support her children through domestic work. Biographer Susan Curtis speculates that Florence's support of her son's musical education was a critical factor behind her separation from Giles, who wanted the boy to pursue practical employment that would supplement the family income.
At 16, Joplin performed in a vocal quartet with three other boys in and around Texarkana, also playing piano. He also taught guitar and mandolin. According to a family friend, the young Joplin was serious and ambitious in studying music and playing the piano after school. While a few local teachers aided him, he received most of his musical education from Julius Weiss, a German-born American Jewish music professor who had immigrated to Texas in the late 1860s and was employed as music tutor by a prominent local business family. Weiss, as described by San Diego Jewish World writer Eric George Tauber, "was no stranger to [receiving] race hatred ... As a Jew in Germany, he was often slapped and called a 'Christ-killer'". Weiss had studied music at a German university and was listed in town records as a professor of music. Impressed by Joplin's talent, and realizing the Joplin family's dire straits, Weiss taught him free of charge. While tutoring Joplin from the age of 11 until he turned 16, Weiss introduced him to folk and classical music, including opera. Weiss helped Joplin appreciate music as an "art as well as an entertainment" and helped Florence acquire a used piano. According to Joplin's widow Lottie, Joplin never forgot Weiss. In his later years, after achieving fame as a composer, Joplin sent his former teacher "gifts of money when he was old and ill" until Weiss died.
Life in the Southern states and Chicago
In the late 1880s, having performed at various local events as a teenager, Joplin gave up his job as a railroad laborer and left Texarkana to become a traveling musician. Little is known about his movements at this time, although he is recorded in Texarkana in July 1891 as a member of the Texarkana Minstrels, who were raising money for a monument to Jefferson Davis, president of the former Confederate States of America. However, Joplin soon learned that there were few opportunities for black pianists. Churches and brothels were among the few options for steady work. Joplin played pre-ragtime "jig-piano" in various red-light districts throughout the mid-South, and some claim he was in Sedalia and St. Louis, Missouri, during this time.
In 1893, while in Chicago for the World's Fair, Joplin formed a band in which he played cornet and also arranged the band's music. Although the World's Fair minimized the involvement of African Americans, black performers still came to the saloons, cafés, and brothels that lined the fair. The exposition was attended by 27 million visitors and had a profound effect on many areas of American cultural life, including ragtime. Although specific information is sparse, numerous sources have credited the Chicago World's Fair with spreading the popularity of ragtime. Joplin found that his music, as well as that of other black performers, was popular with visitors. By 1897, ragtime had become a national craze in U.S. cities and was described by the St. Louis Dispatch as "a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city-bred people".
In 1894, Joplin arrived in Sedalia, Missouri. At first, Joplin stayed with the family of Arthur Marshall, a 13-year-old boy who later became one of Joplin's students and a ragtime composer in his own right. There is no record of Joplin having a residence in the town until 1904, as Joplin was making a living as a touring musician.
There is little precise evidence known about Joplin's activities at this time, although he performed as a solo musician at dances and at the major black clubs in Sedalia, the Black 400 Club and the Maple Leaf Club. He performed in the Queen City Cornet Band and his own six-piece dance orchestra. A tour with his own singing group, the Texas Medley Quartet, gave him his first opportunity to publish his own compositions, and it is known that he went to Syracuse, New York, and Texas. Three businessmen from Syracuse (M. L. Mantell and the Leiter brothers) published Joplin's first two works, the songs "Please Say You Will" and "A Picture of Her Face", in 1895. Joplin's visit to Temple, Texas, enabled him to have three pieces published there in 1896, including the "Great Crush Collision March", which commemorated a planned train crash on the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad on September 15 that he may have witnessed. The march was described by one of Joplin's biographers as a "special ... early essay in ragtime". While in Sedalia, Joplin taught piano to students who included future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Brun Campbell and Scott Hayden. Joplin enrolled at the George R. Smith College, where he apparently studied "advanced harmony and composition". The college's records were destroyed in a fire in 1925, and biographer Edward A. Berlin notes that it was unlikely that a small college for African-Americans would be able to provide such a course.