Joplin, Scott

Joplin, Scott, preeminent American ragtime composer; b. in Texarkana, Tex., Nov. 24, 1868; d. N.Y., April 1, 1917. At a time when ragtime was at its popular peak, Joplin was its foremost practitioner. His piano rags, such as “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer,” were played throughout the U.S. and Europe. He aspired to a greater musical respectability, however, and worked for much of his life on more ambitious compositions, notably his opera, Treemonisha. His reputation was in eclipse during the decades immediately after his death, but by the 1970s his music had regained its currency.

Joplin’s father, Giles Joplin, was a freed slave from N.C. who had moved to Tex. in his teens and become a farm laborer. His mother, Florence Givens, from Ky., was freeborn. By 1880 the family had moved to Texarkana, where his father found work on the railroad. After his parents separated in the early 1880s, his mother supported the family as a domestic. Both parents were musical: his father played the violin; his mother played the banjo and sang. Joplin was playing banjo by the age of seven, and he studied music with Mag Washington, J.C. Johnson, and, probably, a German named Julius Weiss who introduced him to European classical music. He also seems to have had some secondary schooling, though education for African-Americans was restricted at the time.

Joplin gained local renown as a musician. About 1885 he formed a vocal quartet, which sang professionally in the area for several years. He also played piano locally and taught guitar and mandolin. He then left Texarkana to make his living as a traveling pianist. Eventually he settled in St. Louis. In 1893 he traveled to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair remembered for quickening the emergence of ragtime as a popular genre, and he formed a band there in which he played cornet. He returned to St. Louis after the fair, and in 1894 moved to Sedalia, Mo., where he established, with his brothers Robert and Will, The Texas Medley Quartette (actually an octet), which toured as far as Syracuse, N.Y. He briefly joined The Queen City Cornet Band as first cornetist, then formed his own six-piece band to play dances while also continuing to play solo in clubs and brothels. He enrolled at the Smith Coll. of Music in Sedalia and studied composition.

After publishing a few works with other publishers, Joplin began a long association with a Sedalia-based music-store owner and music publisher, John Stark, who brought out “Maple Leaf Rag,” for which Stark paid a royalty of one cent per copy of sheet music, an unusually generous arrangement at a time when most compositions by African-American artists were sold outright for small fees. Joplin agreed to a five-year exclusive contract with Stark, though he violated it by publishing works with others.

Though “Maple Leaf Rag,” which became one of the most popular rags of the time, demonstrated his mastery of the form, Joplin always aspired to write more ambitious works. In 1899 he formed the Scott Joplin Drama Company and rented the Woods Opera House in Sedalia to stage a performance of his ballet (actually a work for singing narrator and dancers), The Ragtime Dance, apparently in an effort to convince Stark to publish it. But Stark initially declined. Joplin did find encouragement, however, when he met and began to study with German music teacher Alfred Ernst, who was the conductor of The St. Louis Choral Symphony Society, in late 1900 or early 1901.

Joplin moved back to St. Louis in the spring of 1901 with Belle (probably Belle Jones, the widow of his sometime collaborator Scott Hayden’s brother Joe), who had become his wife, though it is not clear whether they were legally married. The couple separated in 1903, shortly after the death of an infant daughter. Joplin married Freddie Alexander in Little Rock, Ark., on June 14, 1904, but she died three months later. He seems to have entered into a common- law marriage with Lottie Stokes in N.Y. sometime between 1911 and 1913.

Joplin staged The Ragtime Dance a second time in late 1901, again without convincing Stark to publish it. But the increasing popularity of his rags eventually caused the publisher to relent, and the ballet finally was published the following year. While continuing to write notable rags such as “The Entertainer” and “Elite Syncopations,” he set to work on an opera, A Guest of Honor, which seems to have been given a tryout in St. Louis in August 1903. He also took it on tour, but this was a failure, and his opera company devolved into a minstrel show before disbanding completely. (Although Joplin wrote to the Library of Congress to apply for a copyright for the opera on Feb. 16, 1903, no score has ever been found.)

For the next four years, Joplin lived variously in Chicago, St. Louis, and Sedalia, publishing his songs, rags, and other piano works, and traveling around the Midwest as a touring pianist. In the summer of 1907 he moved permanently to N.Y., where Stark, still his main publisher, had already relocated, and where the major music publishers were located. He published an instruction manual, The School of Ragtime, in 1908. While continuing to tour and to write popular rags, he worked on a second opera, Treemonisha, which he was forced to publish himself after established publishers rejected it. He managed to arrange a single informal performance in Harlem, probably in the fall of 1911, but this did not lead to a full-scale production.

As ragtime declined in popularity, Joplin found it more difficult to work as a composer and musician, and he turned increasingly to teaching music to support himself. By late 1915 he had begun to exhibit the symptoms of dementia paralytica, a late manifestation of terminal syphilis. His health declined over the next year-and-a-half until his death.

During Joplin’s lifetime, the popularity of his work was reflected in the developing recording industry. In 1907 the U.S. Marine Band released a successful recording of “Maple Leaf Rag” on Victor, and Vess Ossman recorded a banjo version of it for Columbia. But as ragtime went out of fashion, Joplin lapsed into obscurity in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s, articles about him began to appear, leading to the first significant biographical work about him and his contemporaries, They All Played Ragtime. A small but fervent following existed in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the founding of Rag Times magazine in May 1966.

In December 1970, Elektra Nonesuch Records released Piano Rags by Scott Joplin, the first of three albums by Joshua Rifkin that began to bring Joplin back into public consciousness. In 1973 The New England Cons. Ragtime Ensemble, conducted by Günther Schuller, reached the charts with The Red Back Book, an album of Joplin rags; it went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. The same year, film director George Roy Hill decided to use Joplin’s music in The Sting (even though the film was set in the 1930s), which opened in the fall of 1973 and became the second-biggest box office hit of the year. By now out of copyright, the rags were arranged by Marvin Hamlisch, who won an Academy Award for his adaptation. The Sting soundtrack album topped the charts and went gold, while “The Entertainer,” released as a single, became a Top Ten gold-selling hit and won Hamlisch a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. (When he also won the Best New Artist Grammy, Hamlisch accepted the award by noting that Joplin was “the real new artist of the year.”)

Even before this success, Treemonisha had begun to attract notice, enjoying a world premiere performance at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center and a second performance at Wolf Trap Farm outside Washington, D.C., in 1972. The Houston Grand Opera followed with a more elaborate production in May 1975 that moved to Broadway for a limited run five months later. In 1976, Joplin won a Pulitzer Prize, confirming the restoration of his place in American musical history.

Works

songs:”Please Say You Will” (copyright Feb. 20, 1895); “A Picture of Her Face” (July 3, 1895); “I Am Thinking of My Pickaninny Days” (April 9, 1902; lyrics by Henry Jackson); “Little Black Baby” (Oct. 7, 1903; lyrics by Louise Armstrong Bristol); “Sarah Dear” (Aug. 11, 1905; lyrics by Henry Jackson); “Snoring Sampson” (May 6, 1907; lyrics by Harry La Mertha); “When Your Hair Is Like the Snow” (May 18, 1907; lyrics by Owen Spendthrift). Piano: ”The Crush Collision March” (Oct. 15, 1896); “Harmony Club Waltz” (Nov. 16, 1896); “Combination March” (Nov. 16, 1896); “Original Rags” (March 15, 1899); “Maple Leaf Rag” (Sept. 18, 1899); “Swipesy Cake Walk” (July 21, 1900; with Arthur Marshall); “Sun Flower Slow Drag” (March 18, 1901; with Scott Hayden); “Peacherine Rag” (March 18, 1901); “Augustan Club Waltz” (March 25, 1901); “The Easy Winners” (Oct. 10, 1901); “Cleopha” (May 19, 1902); “March Majestic” (1902); “The Strenuous Life” (1902); “A Breeze from Alabama” (Dec. 29, 1902); “Elite Syncopations” (Dec. 29, 1902); “The Entertainer” (Dec. 29, 1902); “Something Doing” (Jan. 10, 1903; with Hayden); “Weeping Willow” (June 6, 1903); “Palm Leaf Rag” (Nov. 14, 1903); “The Favorite” (June 23, 1904); “The Sycamore” (July 18, 1904); “The Cascades” (Aug. 22, 1904); ’The Chrysanthemum” (Aug. 22, 1904); “The Rose-bud March” (1905); “Bethena” (March 6, 1905); “Binks’ Waltz” (Aug. 11, 1905); “Leola” (Dec. 18, 1905); “Eugenia” (Feb. 26, 1906); “Antoinette” (Dec. 12, 1906); “Heliotrope Bouquet” (Dec. 23, 1907; with Louis Chauvin); “The Nonpareil” (April 1907); “Searchlight Rag” (Aug. 12, 1907); “Gladiolus Rag” (Sept. 4, 1907); “Lily Queen” (Nov. 7, 1907; with Marshall); “Rose Leaf Rag” (Nov. 15, 1907); “Fig Leaf Rag” (Feb. 24, 1908); “Sugar Cane” (April 21, 1908); “Pine Apple Rag” (Oct. 12, 1908); “Wall Street Rag” (Feb. 23, 1909); “Solace” (April 28, 1909); “Pleasant Moments” (May 11, 1909); “Country Club” (May 11, 1909); “Euphonic Sounds” (Oct. 28, 1909); “Paragon Rag” (Oct. 29, 1909); “Stoptime Rag” (Jan. 4, 1910); “Felicity Rag” (July 27, 1911; with Hayden); “Scott Joplin’s New Rag” (May 1, 1912); “Kismet Rag” (Feb. 21, 1913; with Hayden); “Magnetic Rag” (July 21, 1914); “Reflection Rag (Syncopated Musings)” (Dec. 4, 1917). Ballet: The Ragtime Dance (Dec. 29, 1902). opera:Treemonisha (May 22, 1911).

Discography

The Entertainer: Classic Ragtime from Rare Piano Rolls (1992); Ragtime: Original Piano Rolls 1896-1917 (1995); The Original Piano Rolls 1899-1916 (1995).

Bibliography

R. Blesh and H. Janis, They All Played Ragtime (N.Y., 1950, 4th ed., 1971); V. B. Lawrence, ed., The Complete Works of S. J..J. (N.Y., 1981); A. W. Reed, The Life and Works ofS. J. (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of N.C., 1973); P. Gammond, S. J. and the Ragtime Era (N.Y., 1975); J. Haskins with K. Benson, S. J.: The Man Who Made Ragtime (N.Y., 1978); K. Preston, S. J. (N.Y., 1988); E. A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: S. J. and His Era (N.Y., 1994); S. Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of S. J.. (Columbia, Mo., 1994).

—William Ruhlmann