Viewed as the "King of Ragtime", Scott Joplin composed more than 40 ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. He was one of six children born in Texarkana, TX, a town situated on the border between Texas and Arkansas in 1868 or 1867. His birth date is uncertain, because census records of African Americans were not kept very well. But it is most commonly believed to be November 24, 1868. The second the six Joplin children, Scott’s ear seemed most alive to music, and his teachers admired his gift. Scott learned how to play the guitar at a young age and later took to the piano, displaying a gift for the instrument. At an early age they moved to Texarkana, on the Texas-Arkansas border, it was here, that Scott was exposed to the piano and learned to play.
Joplin got some musical education from his family, and from the age of seven he was allowed to play the piano while his mother cleaned. In the early 1880s, his father left the family for another woman and his mother struggled to support her children through domestic work. She supported her son's musical interest, while his father wanted the boy to pursue a more practical career. When his talent was recognized he was formally instructed by Julius Weiss, a German-born American teacher. Weiss had studied music at a German university and was listed in town records as a professor of music. He was impressed by Joplin's talent, and taught him free of charge from age 11-16, teaching him the works of European composers, as well as the nuts and bolts of musical theory and harmony.
Just a teenager, a baby-faced and well-mannered Scott went out in the world looking for work, boarding rumbling trains with a steely determination to find gigs in a segregated landscape. At the age of 16, Joplin performed in a vocal quartet with three other boys, called the Texas Medley Quartette and soon was performing at dances, events, meetings and weddings, playing piano. He also taught guitar and mandolin. During the 1880's he traveled the South as a touring musician. 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. In the summer of 1893, Joplin went to Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Organizers didn’t want Black people officially involved, but didn’t stop them from playing around the venue itself.
The exposition was attended by 27 million visitors and had a profound effect on many areas of American cultural life, including ragtime. It was here that many people from around the nation were first exposed to ragtime music. Patrons hurried to hear Joplin, who was already imagining ways to expand his talents. The exposition was attended by 27 million visitors and had a profound effect on many areas of American cultural life, including ragtime. Joplin found that his music, as well as that of other Black performers, was popular with visitors. Joplin then met a young piano player, Otis Saunders, who became a close friend and would be an important adviser during his future career. In 1894 Joplin arrived in Sedalia, Missouri which would later become known as the "Cradle of Classic Ragtime." By the mid-1890s, a tour with his own singing group, the Texas Medley Quartet, gave him his first opportunity to publish his own compositions.
While in Sedalia he played piano and in 1896 enrolled in George R. Smith College, a small Black institution in Sedalia, to improve his musical abilities. He played with local bands, and taught piano and composition to other ragtime composers, most notably Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden. This nurturing side would forever buoy Joplin's reputation within the musical community. In several cases, to help the careers of his lesser known contemporaries, Joplin lent his big-money name to their compositions. In 1895 he returned to St. Louis and began spending time at Turpin’s ragtime headquarters, the Rosbud Cafe. Turpin, credited with the first published black American rag, “Harlem Rag” (1897), became an inspiration and friend to Joplin. Unlike classical music, ragtime was a nontraditional type of playing, as if the pianist were doodling with his fingers. He saw ragtime as a form of classical music meant to be played in concert halls.
As Joplin grew into his itinerant musician lifestyle, his reputation exploded. The improvisational style of ragtime suited him, and he refused to take a back seat to older ragtime pianists as word spread of his prowess. He published his first piano rag, "Original Rags," in the late 1890s, but was made to share credit with another arranger. 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 1899, he wrote and published his next and most famous song, “Maple Leaf Rag.” The composition was an immediate success and quickly sold thousands of copies. Ragtime music was already popular, but the “Maple Leaf Rag” became the standard for the genre. The "Maple Leaf Rag" did serve as a model for the hundreds of rags to come from future composers, especially in the development of classic ragtime.
Joplin caught the attention of John Stark, a local businessman, who purchased rights to Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Joplin and his attorney negotiated with publisher John Stark, a one cent royalty for every sale which provided him an income far greater than most composers of the day. Such an arrangement was a wild departure from the norm, which netted composers no royalties and advances rarely surpassing $25. With the royalties he earned, Joplin could now afford to stop playing the piano for a living and concentrate on composing and teaching. “Maple Leaf Rag” also made John Stark a leading publisher in ragtime music. After the publication of the "Maple Leaf Rag", Joplin was soon being described as "King of Ragtime writers", not least by himself.
His signature style emerged as a combination of jumpy timing and sweet-sounding piano work. In a widely quoted description, Stark himself would say Joplin possessed “the skill of a Beethoven with the sentiment of a Black Mamma’s croon.” It was a way of saying that Joplin mixed a European classic sensibility with Black folkloric music — by way of the piano. He gave his compositions elegant names, such as "The Chrysanthemum" and "Heliotrope Bouquet," capturing the lyrical mood and seriousness of classical music. He moved his music store to St. Louis and made music publishing his full-time business. During his time in St. Louis, Joplin collaborated with Scott Hayden in the composition of four rags. The world of vaudeville was a rollicking place to be, but for Black performers it could also be psychologically wretched. Entertainers like Bert Williams and George Walker performed a blackface act, even including a racial slur in the name of their act (Two Real Coons). Ragtime was the soundtrack of that milieu. In 1901, Joplin married his first wife Belle Jones, a sister-in-law of Scott Hayden. They eventually moved to St. Louis, where he continued to compose and publish and regularly performed in the community.
During his time in St. Louis, Joplin collaborated with Scott Hayden in the composition of four rags, which produced some of his best-known works, including "The Entertainer", "March Majestic", and the short theatrical work "The Ragtime Dance". After the death of his wife, Joplin married Freddie Alexander of Little Rock, Arkansas, the young woman to whom he had dedicated "The Chrysanthemum", in the summer of June 1904. Joplin now devoted all his time to composing and teaching. During that year educator and civil rights leader Booker T. Washington came to the White House for dinner as a guest of President Theodore Roosevelt. It was a thrilling moment for African Americans and inspired Joplin’s first opera, "A Guest of Honor". He took it on a national tour. It is not certain how many productions were staged, or even whether this was an all-Black show or a racially mixed production. It is believed that the score for "A Guest of Honor" was lost and perhaps destroyed. Joplin, tried, but was unsuccessful in finding a backer or publisher for the opera, including Stark.
Meanwhile, Joplin’s personal life was not a success either. His wife was not interested in his musical career. After the death of their infant girl, Belle and Joplin separated. Belle died two years later. Depressed and discouraged, Joplin moved to Chicago in 1906, for reasons unknown, but he wanted to move to New York. Scott Joplin was often troubled by financial woes, as he lacked business savvy to protect the income he received from royalties. Joplin moved to New York City in 1907, and met Lottie Stokes, whom he married in 1909. He began securing funding for another opera he had created, "Treemonisha", a multi-genre theatrical project which told the story of a rural Black community near Texarkana. Joplin consulted the great African American opera composer Harry Lawrence Freeman on "Treemonisha". “I am a composer of ragtime music, but I want it thoroughly understood that my opera ‘Treemonisha’ is not ragtime,” he said in notices published in Black newspapers. "Treemonisha" went unnoticed and unreviewed, largely because Joplin had abandoned commercial music in favor of art music.
Never an astute businessman, Joplin often had little of his royalties remaining, and he went further into debt mounting the production. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form that had made him famous. He wrote other operas including "Bethena" and "Sarah Dear Leona", but the efforts left him almost penniless and forced him to play ragtime again for money. Despite the setback Joplin continued to write, and publish dozens of compositions including ragtime songs, such as "Gladiolus Rag" in 1907, and "Sugar Cane Rag" in 1908, in addition to waltzes, marches and several operas. Joplin was intensely concerned with making sure the genre received its proper due, taking note of the disparaging comments made by some White critics due to the music's African American origins and radical form. As such, he published a 1908 series that broke down the complexities of ragtime form for students: "The School of Ragtime: Six Exercises for Piano". In 1914, Joplin and Lottie self-published his "Magnetic Rag" as the Scott Joplin Music Company.
In his final years, Joplin was preoccupied with writing a ragtime opera. His ability to realize this dream was hampered by the effects of syphilis, the disease that would eventually kill him. His increasingly unpredictable behavior made life difficult for his wife, Lottie, and for those who admired his talents. Finally, “Treemonisha” got just a single showing at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem in 1915. Poorly staged and with only Joplin on piano accompaniment, it was "a miserable failure" to a public not ready for "crude" Black musical forms. The show’s collapse crushed Joplin. With his spirits plummeted, Scott Joplin, moved uptown, just a few years before the Harlem Renaissance would make his new neighborhood the cultural center of Black America. But he would not live to see the transformation. Joplin focused on composing more ragtime works, with the genre taking the country by storm and Joplin earning acclaim for his artistry. While Joplin never made an audio recording, his playing is preserved on seven piano rolls for use in mechanical player pianos. All seven were made in 1916. Of these, the six released under the Connorized label show evidence of editing to correct the performance to strict rhythm and add embellishments.
Although Joplin wrote many new compositions in New York, his health was deteriorating from the advanced stages of syphilis. He was only 49 when he died in a mental hospital in New York in 1916. Joplin's death is widely considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format. Some writers have suggested that when Joplin died in 1917, he did so brokenhearted, shattered that his entry into the most socially redeeming class of music—opera—had been a bust. Over the next several years, it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz and, eventually, swing. Joplin and his fellow ragtime composers rejuvenated American popular music, fostering an appreciation for African American music among European Americans by creating exhilarating and liberating dance tunes. The 1973 film "The Sting", featured several of Joplin's compositions, most notably "The Entertainer". Because of the film and its score, Joplin's work became appreciated in both the popular and classical music world. The opera "Treemonisha" was finally produced in full, to wide acclaim, in 1972.