In those songs he found a sense of uplift, hope and possibility.
In the post-Civil War era, the cruel breath of slavery and the aborted plan of Reconstruction still hung over the American South. But in the Joplin home, banjo and fiddle music filled the family’s evenings, giving the children — Scott in particular — a sense of music’s power to move.
Even among the colossal outpouring of distinctive American music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Scott Joplin’s compositions stand out as classics. He would come to be revered as a ragtime giant, writing such hits as “Gladiolus Rag,” “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag.”
His piano compositions were a hit in the saloons of the Midwest — he almost single-handedly put St. Louis on the musical map — but also in the high-society parlors of great European capitals. But fame, witchy and mercurial, didn’t save him from the quagmire of race, money woes, and public fecklessness in his lifetime.
Scott Joplin was born in either 1867 or 1868 (accounts differ) in Texarkana, Texas, to Giles, a laborer, and Florence (Givens) Joplin, who cleaned houses for a living. The family moved between threadbare homes in that border region.
Of the six Joplin children, Scott’s ear seemed most alive to music, and his teachers admired his gift. Florence Joplin would sometimes bargain with owners of the houses she cleaned: She would work for free certain days if Scott could practice on their piano or other instruments. When Scott’s father abandoned the family, life for them became desperate. Just a teenager, a baby-faced and well-mannered Scott went out in the world, boarding rumbling trains with a steely determination to find gigs in a segregated landscape.
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. Ragtime was the soundtrack of that milieu.
Unlike classical music, ragtime was a nontraditional type of playing, as if the pianist were doodling with his fingers, a mad rush of key tapping; “ragged playing,” some called it.
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. His arrival in a town made news: Joplin is here.
In summer 1893, Joplin went to Chicago for the World’s Fair. Organizers didn’t want black people officially involved, but didn’t stop them from playing around the venue itself. Patrons hurried to hear Joplin, who was already imagining ways to expand his talents.
By the mid-1890s, he was writing his own compositions. While in Sedalia, Missouri, he caught the attention of John Stark, a local businessman, who purchased rights to Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” When it was published in 1899, it became a sensation, and all 10,000 copies quickly sold. (Future printings would ensure Joplin decent royalties for the rest of his life.) There would be other compositions: “Magnetic Rag,” “Weeping Willow,” and Joplin’s most famous piece, “The Entertainer.”
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.
Despite his commercial success, Joplin’s love life had been clocked by sadness nearly from the beginning. A child from an early union died. In 1904, he married a woman who reportedly died that very year. Eventually, he found comfort with Lottie Stokes, his last companion, who operated a boardinghouse to bring in added income. Joplin was often troubled by financial woes, as he lacked business savvy to protect the income he received from royalties. Smart marketing also eluded him. “He didn’t have the right personality to push himself,” Edward A. Berlin, who wrote the 1994 book “King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era,” said in a phone interview. “He was not Bert Williams or Eubie Blake.”
When Joplin arrived in New York City in 1907, he was popular enough to find work right away. There were popular cabarets in town — Barron’s Little Savoy, the Douglass Club, Banks’ Club — and they all lobbied for him to appear. But despite the interest in ragtime, Joplin and his cohort were well aware that their music was still thought of as a low form — “whorehouse music,” some labeled it, and Joplin’s earnings were meager. From the pulpit, ministers bemoaned its bawdy popularity. James Reese Europe, a celebrated black composer, found time to ridicule ragtime, claiming the term itself was “merely a nickname or a fun-name given to Negro rhythm by our Caucasian brother musicians many years ago.”
Joplin figured if his music were to last, it would have to conquer the vulgarity associated with the genre. “Ragtime rhythm is a syncopation original with the colored people, though many of them are ashamed of it,” he acknowledged, according to Berlin’s book.
“If someone were to put vulgar words to a strain of one of Beethoven’s beautiful Symphonies, people would begin saying: ‘I don’t like Beethoven’s Symphonies,'” he added. “So it is the unwholesome words and not the ragtime melodies that many people hate.”
To elevate his oeuvre, Joplin turned to opera. He wrote “Treemonisha,” with autobiographical leanings that drew on the standing traditions of European composition. Surely, Joplin thought, greater respect would be forthcoming.
“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. Never an astute businessman, Joplin often had little of his royalties remaining, and he went further into debt mounting the production. Finally, “Treemonisha” got just a single showing at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem in 1915. The show’s collapse crushed Joplin. His spirits plummeted.
By this time, he had 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.
A syphilis diagnosis put Joplin on his back, and throughout 1916 friends watched his health worsen and his sanity decline. After a stretch in a mental hospital, Joplin died on April 1, 1917. He was about 50.
His death went unnoticed by most of the nation’s newspapers, including The New York Times. His body landed in a pauper’s grave in Queens, which went unmarked for decades — yet another gifted black artist gone in the wind.
Joplin’s posthumous recognition was a long time coming, but come it did. In the 1970s “Treemonisha” was staged in both Atlanta and Houston, and also had a brief Broadway run.
“All the things we identify with in a grand opera — overture, arias, a prelude to the third act — are in Joplin’s ‘Treemonisha,'” said T.J. Andrews Jr., who was a composer in residence with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra when the opera premiered there in 1972.
He said that “Treemonisha” was very likely an influence on George Gershwin’s monumental “Porgy and Bess.”
“We certainly know that Gershwin saw the Joplin score,” Andrews said.
In 1973, the hit movie “The Sting” used Joplin’s music as a recurring theme. The music was considered so charming that it got a big round of radio play, and Joplin recordings were rereleased because of public demand. It was as if the nation had suddenly discovered a new and dazzling composer. Joplin’s grave was given a suitable marker. And in 1976, he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to American music.
There is little doubt among musicians that Joplin, by elevating ragtime, played a major role in another American music phenomenon that emerged soon after he died. It would be called jazz.