Ragtime King left unique musical legacy
When Scott Joplin died in a New York City asylum on April 1, 1917, the “King of Ragtime” was out of money and out of his mind. Florence Joplin, a freeborn black woman from Kentucky, gave birth to the second of her six children in late 1867 or early 1868 near Linden in northeastern Texas. The boy she called Scott grew up in Texarkana, where his father, an emancipated slave from North Carolina, worked on the railroad and his mother cleaned white people’s houses.
Music was in the youngster’s genes. His father had once played the violin at his master’s parties, and his mother was a gifted singer who accompanied herself on the banjo. Florence instructed Scott on her instrument of choice, and he taught himself how to pound out a tune on a piano owned by one of his mother’s customers.
A professor of music from Germany saw in the 11-year-old the spark of genius. For five years, Julius Weiss fanned that flame for free, teaching his precocious pupil the basics of composition, introducing him to everything from folk to opera and instilling in him an appreciation for music as “art as well as entertainment.”
In his late teens or early 20s, Joplin quit his job as a railroad laborer, likely arranged by his father, and left Texarkana. He traveled the South playing the piano in the only venues open to black musicians at the time – red-light district saloons and brothels.
On occasion Joplin returned to Texarkana to visit his mother and five siblings but not his father, who had run off with another woman. During one such homecoming, financial necessity forced him to perform at a benefit to raise funds for a local monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
In 1893, Joplin joined the 25 million Americans, who flocked to Chicago for the Columbia Exposition better known as the World’s Fair. With his first band playing his original arrangements, he gave fair-goers a preview of ragtime.
The World’s Fair was a cultural melting pot, where Americans from every state were exposed to new sights and sounds. One of those sounds was ragtime, hailed by the St. Louis Dispatch as “a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city-bred people.”
Needing a place to hang his hat and catch his breath, Joplin made Sedalia, Missouri, his home base in 1894. He performed solo and with a six-piece dance orchestra in the area black nightspots and found time to pen his first published songs.
During an extended stay in Temple, Texas, in 1896, Joplin published three more memorable pieces. One of those was the “Great Crush Collision March,” inspired by the staged train wreck billed as “The Crash at Crush” that he may have watched in person.
Joplin’s initial published rag, “Original Rags,” came the following year but served merely as a prelude to “Maple Leaf Rag” that went on sale in sheet music form in 1899. According to a biographer, “Maple Leaf” sold 75,000 copies in six months, making it “the first great instrumental sheet music hit in America.” By 1909, Joplin was earning $16,000 a year in present-day dollars from his signature composition.
The acclaimed “King of Ragtime” moved to St. Louis with his first wife Belle. But the death of their baby girl and Belle’s total lack of interest in her husband’s musical career brought about the breakup of the marriage.
Despite his rocky personal life, the St. Louis years proved to be one of Joplin’s most productive periods. He did some of his best work including “The Entertainer,” “March Majestic” and “The Ragtime Dance.”
In the summer of 1904, Joplin married the woman to whom he had dedicated “The Chrysanthemum.” But the bride survived the wedding by just 10 weeks, succumbing to complications from a cold.
In an apparent attempt to put the tragedy behind him, Joplin sank most of his money into a road production of his opera “A Guest of Honor.” Less than a month into the tour, the box-office receipts were stolen, supposedly by a member of his company. Joplin could not pay the performers or hotel bill and lost the original score when the angry innkeeper seized his belongings.
Joplin spent the last decade of his life in New York fighting the debilitating effects of syphilis and trying to stage his masterpiece, the opera “Treemonisha.” But he lost both battles and died in a mental ward at the age of 49.
“When I am dead 25 years,” Joplin predicted not long before his premature passing, “people are going to recognize me.” He could not have been more right!
At the beginning of the ragtime revival in 1970, Scott Joplin was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Three years later, his music won an Academy Award as the score for the movie “The Sting.” In 1976, the year after a lucky audience finally saw “Treemonisha” courtesy of the Houston Grand Opera, its creator was honored with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
And last but not least, Joplin’s unmarked pauper grave finally got a headstone.