Scott Joplin (c. 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist.

Because of the
fame achieved for his ragtime compositions, he was dubbed the "King of Ragtime."[1] During
his career, he wrote over 40 original ragtime pieces,[2] one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of
his first and most popular pieces, the Maple Leaf Rag, became the genre's first and most
influential hit, later being recognized as the quintessential rag.[3] Joplin considered ragtime to be a
form of classical music and largely disdained the practice of ragtime such as that in honky tonk.
Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Arkansas, developing his
own musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. While in Texarkana, he formed a vocal
quartet and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s, he left his job as a railroad laborer
and traveled the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's
Fair of 1893, which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897.
Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894 and earned a living as a piano teacher. There he
taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. He began
publishing music in 1895, and publication of his "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 brought him fame.
This piece had a profound influence on writers of ragtime. It also brought Joplin a steady income
for life. In 1901, Joplin moved to St. Louis, where he continued to compose and publish and
regularly performed in the community. The score to his first opera, A Guest of Honor, was
confiscated—along with his belongings—in 1903 for non-payment of bills, (likely as a result of
being robbed) and is now considered lost.[4]
In 1907, Joplin moved to New York City to find a producer for a new opera. He attempted to go
beyond the limitations of the musical form that had made him famous but without much monetary
success. His second opera, Treemonisha, was never fully staged during his life. In 1916, Joplin
descended into dementia as a result of neurosyphilis. In February 1917, he was admitted to
a mental asylum and died there three months later at the age of 48. Joplin's death is widely
considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format; over the next several
years, it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz and, eventually, swing.
Joplin's music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of
a million-selling album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award–
winning 1973 film The Sting, which featured several of Joplin's compositions, most notably "The
Entertainer", a piece performed by pianist Marvin Hamlisch that received wide
airplay. Treemonisha was finally produced in full, to wide acclaim, in 1972. In 1976, Joplin was
posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Early life[edit]
Joplin was the second of six children[5] born to Giles Joplin, a former slave from North Carolina,
and Florence Givens, a freeborn African-American woman from Kentucky.[6][7][8] His birth date was
accepted by early biographers Rudi Blesh and James Haskins as November 24,
1868,[9][10] although later biographer Edward A. Berlin showed this was "almost certainly
incorrect".[11] There is disagreement over his exact place of birth in Texas, with Blesh identifying
Texarkana,[10] and Berlin showing the earliest record of Joplin being the June 1870 census which
locates him in Linden, as a two-year-old.[12][13]
By 1880, the Joplins moved to Texarkana, Arkansas, where Giles worked as a railroad laborer
and Florence as a cleaner. As Joplin's father had played the violin for plantation parties in North
Carolina and his mother sang and played the banjo,[5] Joplin was given a rudimentary musical
education by his family, and from the age of seven he was allowed to play the piano while his
mother cleaned.[14]
At some point in the early 1880s, Giles Joplin left the family for another woman and Florence
struggled to support her children through domestic work. Biographer Susan Curtis speculates
that Florence's support of her son's musical education was a critical factor behind her separation
from Giles, who wanted the boy to pursue practical employment that would supplement the
family income.[15]
According to a family friend, the young Joplin was serious and ambitious studying music and
playing the piano after school. While a few local teachers aided him, he received most of his
musical education from Julius Weiss, a German-born American Jewish music professor who had
immigrated to Texas in the late 1860s and was employed as music tutor by a prominent local
business family.[16] Weiss, as described by San Diego Jewish World writer Eric George Tauber,
"was no stranger to [receiving] race hatred...As a Jew in Germany, he was often slapped and
called a 'Christ-killer.'"[17] Weiss had studied music at a German university and was listed in town
records as a professor of music. Impressed by Joplin's talent, and realizing the Joplin family's
dire straits, Weiss taught him free of charge. While tutoring Joplin from the ages of 11 to 16,
Weiss introduced him to folk and classical music, including opera. Weiss helped Joplin
appreciate music as an "art as well as an entertainment"[18] and helped Florence acquire a used
piano. According to Joplin's widow Lottie, Joplin never forgot Weiss. In his later years, after
achieving fame as a composer, Joplin sent his former teacher "gifts of money when he was old
and ill" until Weiss died.[16] At the age of 16, Joplin performed in a vocal quartet with three other
boys in and around Texarkana, also playing piano. He also taught guitar and mandolin.[18]

Life in the southern states and Chicago[edit]

In the late 1880s, having performed at various local events as a teenager, Joplin gave up his job
as a railroad laborer and left Texarkana to become a traveling musician.[19] Little is known about
his movements at this time, although he is recorded in Texarkana in July 1891 as a member of
the Texarkana Minstrels, who were raising money for a monument to Jefferson Davis, president
of the former Confederate States of America.[20] 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, and some claim he was in Sedalia and St. Louis, Missouri, during this time.[21][22]
In 1893, while in Chicago for the World's Fair, Joplin formed a band in which he
played cornet and also arranged the band's music. Although the World's Fair minimized the
involvement of African-Americans, Black performers still came to the saloons, cafés and brothels
that lined the fair. The exposition was attended by 27 million visitors and had a profound effect on
many areas of American cultural life, including ragtime. Although specific information is sparse,
numerous sources have credited the Chicago World's Fair with spreading the popularity of
ragtime.[23] Joplin found that his music, as well as that of other Black performers, was popular with
visitors.[24] 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.J"[25]

Later years and death[edit]

Scott Joplin Memorial

Front cover of the "Wall Street Rag" (1909) sheet music

In 1907, Joplin moved to New York City, which he believed was the best place to find a producer
for a new opera. After his move to New York, Joplin met Lottie Stokes, whom he married in
1909.[42] In 1911, unable to find a publisher, Joplin undertook the financial burden of
publishing Treemonisha himself in piano-vocal format. In 1915, as a last-ditch effort to see it
performed, he invited a small audience to hear it at a rehearsal hall in Harlem. Poorly staged and
with only Joplin on piano accompaniment, it was "a miserable failure" to a public not ready for
"crude" Black musical forms—so different from the European grand opera of that time.[47] The
audience, including potential backers, was indifferent and walked out.[48] Scott writes that "after a
disastrous single performance...Joplin suffered a breakdown. He was bankrupt, discouraged, and
worn out." He concludes that few American artists of his generation faced such obstacles:
"Treemonisha went unnoticed and unreviewed, largely because Joplin had abandoned
commercial music in favor of art music, a field closed to African Americans."[33] In fact, it would
not be until the 1970s that the opera received a full theatrical staging.
In 1914, Joplin and Lottie self-published his "Magnetic Rag" as the Scott Joplin Music Company,
which he had formed the previous December.[49] Biographer Vera Brodsky Lawrence speculates
that Joplin was aware of his advancing deterioration due to syphilis and was "consciously racing
against time." In her sleeve notes on the 1992 Deutsche Grammophon release of Treemonisha,
she notes that he "plunged feverishly into the task of orchestrating his opera, day and night, with
his friend Sam Patterson standing by to copy out the parts, page by page, as each page of the
full score was completed."[50]
By 1916, Joplin had developed tertiary syphilis,[51][52] but more specifically it likely
was neurosyphilis. On February 2, 1917, he was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital, a mental
institution.[53] He died there on April 1 of syphilitic dementia at the age of 48[47][54] and was buried in
a pauper's grave that remained unmarked for 57 years. His grave at St. Michael's Cemetery in
East Elmhurst was finally given a marker in 1974, the year The Sting, which showcased his
music, won for Best Picture at the Oscars.[55]