Scott Joplin

The boy from Texas

Joplin was born around 1868 in Texas. His father, born into slavery and later freed, was a railroad laborer; his mother worked as a domestic. Growing up in Texarkana, the boy fell in love with music playing the piano in a house where his mother worked.

The person who recognized his talent was Julius Weiss, a music teacher from Germany. Weiss is said to have taught the poor boy piano and music theory without charge and told him about European opera. Joplin never forgot that kindness.

The traveling pianist

From his late teens Joplin roamed the cities of the American Midwest playing piano, in saloons, clubs and dance halls. In the 1890s he settled in Sedalia, Missouri, and studied music further at a college for Black students.

Ragtime

Ragtime was piano music that grew among Black musicians in the late nineteenth century. The left hand marches steadily; the right hand dodges the beat and skips off it. Joplin carefully refined this music, turning it from improvised saloon music into composed works that lived on paper. In 1908 he even published a method on how to play ragtime properly, warning again and again not to play it fast, since rushing ruins the flavor of the off-beats.

Maple Leaf Rag

In 1899 the Sedalia publisher John Stark brought out Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag." It sold steadily for years and made his name known across America. He then moved to St Louis and published rag after rag, including "The Entertainer."

New York, and oblivion

Around 1907 Joplin moved to New York and threw himself into Treemonisha, the story of an educated girl in a freed Black community who leads her neighbors out of superstition and ignorance. But he could not find backers, and his health steadily declined. He died in New York in 1917, at about forty-eight. By then ragtime's vogue was already giving way to jazz.

Joplin's music was loved anew in the 1970s. "The Entertainer" was used in the film The Sting, reviving his name, and Treemonisha was at last properly staged. In 1976, nearly sixty years after his death, he received a special Pulitzer Prize.

Music to hear on Pyeongeum

• "Maple Leaf Rag"the twelfth stop on our Music Journey, the ragtime that opened the dawn of jazz.
• "The Entertainer" and "Solace."

After the lively "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer," try the slow, lyrical "Solace." You can feel Joplin trying to widen ragtime from dance music into music that carries the heart.

People around him

• Julius Weissthe German-born teacher who taught a poor boy music without charge.
• John Starkthe publisher who issued "Maple Leaf Rag" with a contract paying Joplin a share per copy sold.