Scott Joplin
"It is never right to play ragtime fast." — a performance direction Scott Joplin wrote by hand on his own rag scores
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people beside him ⏳🌊
- FamilyFlorence Givens
She was the mother who nurtured her son's musical sensibility with the banjo and song.
- TeacherJulius Weiss
A German immigrant music teacher who taught him harmony and opera free of charge, planting his lifelong orientation toward classical music.
- ColleagueScott Hayden
A fellow pianist with whom he co-wrote rags in the Sedalia years, and a relative of his first wife by marriage.
- PatronJohn Stark
The sheet-music publisher who gave the Maple Leaf Rag an unusual royalty contract, securing him an income for life.
- FamilyLottie Stokes Joplin
His third wife, married in 1909, who ran a boardinghouse and sustained his final work.
- InfluenceJelly Roll Morton
A younger pianist who claimed to have invented jazz himself, and who named Joplin's ragtime as the foundation he stood on.
I. A boy from Texas · 1868–1880 (age 0–12)
(Birth) He was born in 1868 near Linden, a small town in Cass County in northeastern Texas. Records disagree on the exact date; November 24 is the one most often given, but no definitive birth certificate survives. His father, Giles Joplin, was a Black man who had once been enslaved and had learned to play the violin in his master's house; his mother, Florence Givens, was born free and loved to pick the banjo and sing. The couple had six children, and Scott was one of them. (Texarkana) Before long the family moved to Texarkana, a city on the border of Texas and Arkansas. His father made a living as a railroad laborer, his mother as a cleaning woman for well-to-do white families. Florence asked permission for her son to touch the piano in a house where she worked, and young Scott, it is said, first felt out chords at that unfamiliar keyboard. (Weiss) The one who took notice of the boy's gift was Julius Weiss, a German-Jewish music teacher who lived nearby. He taught the Black child harmony and European opera without charging the usual fee, and this encounter became the root of the ambition that would later lead Joplin to aim beyond dance tunes and write opera. (Discord) Yet the household was far from comfortable. His father did not see music as a way to earn a living, tension built between them, and in the end, it is said, his parents separated. His mother, raising the children alone, still guarded her son's hours at the keyboard, and Scott carried the memory of that childhood, mingled poverty and affection, quietly for the rest of his life.
II. The wandering pianist · 1880–1894 (age 12–26)
(Leaving home) Around his mid-teens he left home and began a wandering life, earning his keep alone with nothing but a keyboard. Moving across Texas and the neighboring states, he played piano in street saloons where railroad workers, miners and drifters gathered. (The bottom rung) The stages open to a Black pianist in those days were mostly taverns, gambling houses and brothels. In such places Joplin improvised on a mix of marches, spirituals and minstrel-show tunes, steadily refining what would become the framework of ragtime: a regular bass struck by the left hand, with the right hand pulling against the beat. (Chicago) In 1893 he is said to have gone to the area around the Chicago World's Fair with a touring vocal quartet. Ragtime never made it onto the fair's official stages, but Black pianists who had flocked in from across the country heard and learned from one another in the streets and saloons nearby, and from there the young music quietly spread. (Discrimination) The condition that governed Joplin's life in these years was segregation. The doors of white theaters and established music schools were closed to him, and the only stages he could stand on lay in the shadowed quarters of the city. The contempt he endured in this period is thought to underlie his later obsession with winning recognition for ragtime as art rather than lowly entertainment.
III. Sedalia, the Maple Leaf · 1894–1900 (age 26–32)
(Sedalia) Around 1894 he settled in Sedalia, Missouri. At George R. Smith College, founded for Black students, he briefly studied harmony and composition formally, rebuilding in theory the music he had learned only by ear during his wandering years. (The club) Taking a post as resident pianist at the Maple Leaf Club, a Black social club, he made a name for himself among local musicians. There he met fellow pianist Scott Hayden, formed a friendship and co-wrote several pieces with him, and also came to know Hayden's sister-in-law, Belle. (Stark) John Stark, a white businessman who ran a sheet-music store, heard Joplin play and signed him to a publishing contract on the spot. He chose, unusually for the time, a royalty arrangement that kept paying a fixed share of the list price, and the 'Maple Leaf Rag,' issued in 1899, sold slowly at first but soon ran to hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming for Joplin a source of income that never ran dry. (Marriage) That same year he married Belle Hayden. A daughter born the following year did not survive more than a few months, and Belle, it is said, took little interest in her husband's music. Behind the royalties and fame won on the threshold of success, a shadow was already falling over Joplin's home.
Published under the unusual royalty contract he signed with John Stark in Sedalia, it was his first hit and became his largest source of income for life.
- It has the classic ragtime structure: four sixteen-bar melodic sections (strains) following one another in the order AABBACCD.
- The left hand moves regularly between bass notes and chords, keeping up a march-like stride, while above it the right hand builds a syncopated melody that strikes slightly off the beat.
- Joplin wrote the instruction 'Do not play fast' into the score himself, wanting the piece performed at an unhurried, graceful pace.
- The piano-roll recording he made himself in 1916 is one of the few documents that let us hear his own touch and sense of rhythm.
IV. St. Louis and loss · 1900–1905 (age 32–37)
(The move) In the early 1900s he followed John Stark's publishing house to St. Louis. There he fell in with young pianists such as Arthur Marshall and Louis Chauvin, writing or polishing a number of rags with them, and supplemented his living with private lessons. (Opera) Putting a long-held ambition into practice, in 1903 he completed his first opera, A Guest of Honor. The work drew its subject from the real event of Booker T. Washington's invitation to dinner at the White House, but the story goes that during the tour a company member vanished with the box-office receipts; the troupe, sunk in debt, disbanded, and the score and props were seized in lieu of lodging fees and ultimately lost. (Divorce) Worn down by repeated loss and want, his marriage to Belle did not last, and they separated in the mid-1900s. With the grief of losing their daughter compounded by the opera's failure, the rift between husband and wife had already grown too deep to bridge. (Freddie) In 1904 he remarried, to Freddie Alexander, but just ten weeks into the marriage a cold turned to pneumonia and she died. Rising above this loss, Joplin published the waltz 'Bethena' the following year, and the reading of this, the most melancholy of his works, as a quiet memorial to his wife endures to this day.
Published during his St. Louis years, it shows his matured gift for melody, and was destined to revive him in an unexpected way half a century later.
- Built from three interwoven melodies, it shifts key in the middle section (the trio), where its colors brighten.
- The right-hand syncopation is unusually songlike and fluid, and its tune is counted among the most singable in all of ragtime.
- The left hand's bass-chord pattern keeps a steady two-beat stride, supporting the free syncopation of the right.
A waltz written after his second wife, Freddie Alexander, died ten weeks into their marriage; it is regarded as the most melancholy of his works.
- Unlike most ragtime, it takes the form of a waltz in triple meter, breathing with the swaying pulse of a slow dance rather than a lively march rhythm.
- Frequent modulations into minor keys cast a shadow over the whole piece, in sharp contrast to the bright early rags.
- The passages where left-hand chords linger and stretch out are often read as echoing his personal loss (a traditional interpretation).
V. New York, the dream of Treemonisha · 1905–1911 (age 37–43)
(New York) Around 1907 he moved to New York. Ragtime had already passed the peak of its vogue and was slowly slipping from public attention, but Joplin, if anything, turned in this period toward larger and more serious work. (Lottie) In 1909 he married Lottie Stokes. Together they ran a boardinghouse and built a stable footing for their life, and Lottie stood by her husband so that he could keep at his opera even as his royalty income dwindled. (Ideals) Joplin is said to have harbored a resentment bordering on anger that his music was consumed only as dance tunes for entertainment. He believed the syncopated idiom of ragtime could carry artistic weight no less than European classical music, and in pieces written around this time, such as 'Solace,' he tried harmonies more intimate and contemplative than before. (Treemonisha) The crystallization of that belief was the opera Treemonisha. He completed the work, a fable of a Black community freeing itself from superstition through education, around 1910, but no publisher would take it on, and in 1911 he spent his own savings to publish the piano-vocal score himself.
Written after he settled in New York, it shows a late experiment in drawing on exotic rhythms to widen the frame of ragtime.
- The slow, broken triplet steps in the left hand (the habanera rhythm) create a leisurely sway quite unlike the march-like feel of the typical rag.
- The right-hand melody is a lamenting phrase, briefly repeated and varied, that reveals a more inward feeling than the bright early works.
- True to its title, which means 'consolation,' it flows quietly from beginning to end without any great swings in dynamics.
VI. The thwarted stage · 1911–1917 (age 43–49)
(Neglect) He sent the score he had printed at his own expense to critics and patrons in search of someone who would stage it, but what came back was mostly polite indifference or a show of condescension. The very fact of a full-fledged opera written by a Black composer struck the music world of the day as strange and uncomfortable. (1915) In the end, in 1915, he spent his own savings to arrange a single run-through at a hall in Harlem. With no scenery, no costumes and no orchestra, only a piano accompaniment, the performance drew a small audience and a cold response. Watching his life's masterpiece fade away in so shabby a setting was a blow from which he could hardly recover. (Syphilis) By this time his body was slowly giving way as the syphilis he had contracted long before spread to his nervous system. Colleagues recalled that his memory grew clouded, his moods swung wildly, and he could no longer summon his former concentration to finish new pieces. (Late work) 'Magnetic Rag,' published in 1914, was the last rag to appear in print in his lifetime; in place of the cheerful unity of his early pieces it has an unstable structure whose key shifts often, and later generations have read it as a work steeped in his failing state of mind. Early in 1917 he was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital, and on April 1 he died with Lottie at his side. He was forty-eight.
The last rag he published in his lifetime, it is harmonically more complex and darker than his earlier pieces and is regarded as a work that reflects his state of mind in his final years.
- Its four strains follow one another with frequent changes of key, leaving an impression of unsteady wavering in place of the cheerful unity of the early works.
- The chromatic progression that suddenly appears in the last strain is an experiment hard to find in his earlier rags.
- Some hear in it, like the 'magnetism' of its title, different keys tautly attracting and repelling one another.
An opera carrying the message that the Black community must rise above superstition and move forward through education, it was his life's masterpiece, the distillation of his artistic ambition, yet he never saw it fully staged in his lifetime.
- While taking the form of a full-fledged opera, with arias, choruses and spoken dialogue in alternation, it weaves the syncopated rhythms of ragtime into both the orchestra and the voices.
- It is built on a conflict between characters who stand for superstition and a heroine who stands for education, and the music alone makes that conflict clear.
- It was not fully staged until 1972, in Atlanta, and because Joplin's own orchestration had been lost, Houston Grand Opera's complete 1975 recording used a new orchestration by Gunther Schuller.
VII. After death, sounding again · 1917–2026 (age 49–158)
(Unmarked grave) He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Michael's Cemetery in Queens. For decades Lottie kept the scores and belongings her husband had left behind and searched for someone to stage Treemonisha, but she died without seeing that wish fulfilled. (Silence) As the Jazz Age, swing and bebop each took their turn at the center of popular music, ragtime was pushed aside as an outdated fad, and Joplin's name was remembered only among a handful of collectors and early jazz scholars. A study written by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis in 1950 barely kept that thread alive. (Revival) The turn came in the 1970s. A record of rags made by the pianist Joshua Rifkin in 1970 drew unexpected attention, and when an arrangement of 'The Entertainer' was used in the 1973 film 'The Sting,' it climbed all the way up the pop charts, and his music rang out across America again after half a century. (Recognition) In 1972 Treemonisha was fully staged for the first time, and in 1975 Houston Grand Opera recorded the complete work. In 1974 a headstone was at last placed on his grave, and in 1976 he was awarded a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize, an unusual honor for an American composer. In this way his name, once passed over as that of a honky-tonk pianist, was carved anew as a pillar of American music history.
Lesser-known stories
One detail often passed over in Joplin biographies is the illness he had when he died. For a long time his final years were euphemistically described as simple nervous exhaustion or overwork, and later scholars point out that this was because his family and early researchers were reluctant to mention publicly the diagnosis of neurosyphilis (general paresis) caused by syphilis. Only after the revival boom of the 1970s were hospital records and contemporary testimony re-examined and this fact formally established in scholarship. Another lesser-known detail is that in 1908, in New York, he wrote and self-published a ragtime instruction book, 'School of Ragtime.' Made up of six syncopation exercises, this manual shows that Joplin sought to define himself not merely as a composer but also as a theorist·educator. Moreover, unlike the familiar story of friendly patronage, there are letters showing that considerable bitterness lingered between Joplin and John Stark after Stark refused to publish Treemonisha. These facts seem to have received less light because, in the process of posthumous mythmaking, a simplified image of him as a purely tragic genius was easier for the public to accept as a story.
Glossary 📚🔎
Ragtime
(Meaning) Ragtime is an English word that joins rag and time. The name captures the very feel of this music, which deliberately unsettles a regular beat as it is played. (In jazz) A style of piano music in which, while the left hand keeps a steady "oom–pah oom–pah" beat, the right hand builds the melody on spots slightly off that beat. When you play a hand-clapping game with a friend and clap a beat early or late instead of right on it, it feels much bouncier, and a ragtime piece is built that way from start to finish. Born in the African American musical tradition of the late 19th century, it later became a root of jazz rhythm.
Syncopation
(Meaning) The native Korean name danggimeum ('pulled note') carries its meaning in itself. It comes from the idea of pulling a note forward and striking it ahead of its proper beat. (In jazz) A technique that creates a feeling of rhythm knocked askew by stressing the weak beats before or after the beat that would normally be stressed. In a hand-clapping game, if you slyly sidestep the "one" of "one, two, three, four," the count you would normally clap hardest, and clap hard on the beats in between, it feels much livelier; that is syncopation. It is a core term of ragtime and jazz rhythm.
Strain
(In jazz) A 16-bar melodic section that makes up a ragtime piece; usually three or four follow one another to complete a piece. Just as a storybook is divided into several parts (chapters) that together form one story, a ragtime piece becomes complete as several strains follow in order. It plays a role similar to the verse-chorus structure of today's popular music. (Elsewhere) In music, strain refers to a melodic section, but in everyday speech it is also commonly used for the burden·tension placed on a muscle or the mind.
Cakewalk
(Meaning) The name cakewalk is said to come from the custom of awarding a cake as a prize to the couple who walked most elegantly in a dance contest. (In jazz) A strutting dance, with the body leaning back and the knees lifted high in an exaggerated walk, popular in African American communities in the late 19th century, along with the music that accompanied it. If you have ever mimicked a showy, swaggering walk with friends at a school talent show, think of the cakewalk as exactly that kind of exaggerated gait turned into music and dance. It is a precursor genre that helped ragtime rhythm take shape. (Elsewhere) In English, a cakewalk is also an idiom, unrelated to music, meaning something very easy, like "a piece of cake."
Piano roll
(In jazz) A perforated paper scroll that, when fed into a player piano, reproduces exactly the keys and dynamics a performer actually played. Today we can easily record a voice or a video on a smartphone, but in the days when recorders were rare, the movements of a performer's fingers were preserved as holes punched in a paper scroll, and that is the piano roll. It is thanks to this that the actual playing of Joplin and other pianists of the time survives to this day.
Habanera rhythm
(Meaning) Habanera means "of Havana"; the name comes from its origin as a dance from Havana, the capital of Cuba. (In jazz) A triplet rhythmic figure struck as one long note followed by two short ones; it originated in Cuba, and in the early 20th century many American composers borrowed it to add an exotic color. If you walk side by side with a friend, dragging one step long and then hopping the next two short steps, the bouncy feel is much like the habanera rhythm.