Sunflower Slow Drag

At a glance

• What it isa ragtime piece for solo piano, in B-flat major.
• Who and whenwritten by Scott Joplin and Scott Hayden together, and published in 1901.
• What to listen foran unhurried step, a right hand that slips just off the beat above it, and the moments when a new section begins.

Listen for

• A slow stepslow drag was the name of a slow dance. Since the piece is named after a dance, try listening while picturing bodies swaying gently in time.
• Two hands in conversation: in ragtime the left hand usually moves between low notes and chords to hold the beat steady, while the right hand adds lift with syncopation. Syncopation is rhythm that arrives a little before or after the place where the strong beat should fall. Listen for spots where the hands pull apart and then lock together again.
• When the section changes: a classic rag is usually built from several short sections strung together and repeated. When a new one arrives, notice how the height of the tune or its mood shifts.

When it was written

In the 1890s Joplin was living and playing piano in Sedalia, a small town in Missouri. When the Maple Leaf Rag came out in 1899, his name spread widely. There was no radio yet, so people bought rags as sheet music and played them on the piano at home. That is how ragtime travelled across America, one printed page at a time.

Scott Hayden was a young musician in Sedalia who studied with Joplin and was close to him. Sunflower Slow Drag is one of the rags the two wrote together. Around 1901 Joplin made his home in St. Louis, and the following year he published The Entertainer.

The slow drag comes back

About ten years later Joplin wrote an opera, Treemonisha, and published it at his own expense in 1911. The opera ends with a number called A Real Slow Drag. The step of that slow dance, it seems, stayed with him for a long time. Joplin never saw the opera properly staged in his lifetime, and he died in New York in 1917. His music found a wide audience again in the 1970s, thanks to the film The Sting.