Scott Joplin

Brother John Klaus made a couple of recommendations for Black History Posts. He writes:

Scott Joplin is also a good choice (in my humble opinion). While he's best known for his piano rags, he was educated as a "classical" pianist, and wrote a wonderful opera, "Treemonisha," which is one of my all-time favorites in American music. (I only got to see it once, years ago at Wolf Trap, but it remains a significant musical and theatrical experience of my life). Many of the piano rags were written as etudes to address specific pianistic techniques, and Joplin also wrote a good book on playing the instrument.

I knew of Joplin, like most everybody of my age for his ragtime music which was reintroduced to us by the movie The Sting. I fell in love with ragtime and enjoy it to this day. So finding out about Joplin has been interesting.

He was born in Texas. but no one is really sure of the date. It was probably 1867 but it may have been 1868. Anecdotes relate that the young Scott gained access to a piano in a white-owned home where his mother worked, and taught himself the rudiments of music. In support of this story, we note its reflection in a detail in Treemonisha, an opera that Joplin published in 1911: paying tribute to his mother’s efforts that enabled him to start his musical education, he has the heroine of the opera obtain education through her parent’s labors in a white-owned home.

Joplin located around Sedalia, Missouri and while he traveled around as an tinerant pianist he came back there and in August 1899 contracted with Sedalia music store owner and publisher John Stark to publish The Maple Leaf Rag, which was to become the greatest and most famous of piano rags. The contract specified that Joplin would receive a one-cent royalty on each sale, a condition that rendered Joplin a small, but steady income for the rest of his life.

Joplin was serious about his music and styled himself "The King of Ragtime Writers."
In the late 1890s, Joplin worked at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, which provided the title for his best known composition, the Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899. This was followed a few years later by The Entertainer, another well known Joplin composition. Over the next fifteen years, Joplin added to his already impressive repertoire, which eventually totaled some sixty compositions. In 1911, Joplin moved to New York City, where he devoted his energies to the production of his operatic work, Treemonisha, the first grand opera composed by an African American. At the time, however, this resulted unsuccessfully.

After suffering deteriorating health due to syphilis that he contracted some years earlier, Joplin died on April 1, 1917 in Manhattan State Hospital.

Although Joplin's music was popular and he received modest royalties during his lifetime, he did not receive recognition as a serious composer for more than fifty years after his death. Then, in 1973, his music was featured in the motion picture, The Sting, which won and Academy Award for its film score. Three years later, in 1976, Joplin's opera Treemonisha won the coveted Pulitzer Prize.

Read more about him here, here and here.

Listen to The Entertainer