Scott Joplin (Bowie County, Texas, c1867 - New York City April 1, 1917) remains the best-known ragtime musician and composer, setting the standard for the many who followed.
Joplin was born near Linden, Texas to Florence Givins and Jiles Joplin. He was the second of six children.
After 1871 the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Texas and Scott's mother cleaned homes so Scott could have a place to practice his music. By 1882 his mother had purchased a piano.
By the late 1880s Joplin had left home to start a life of his own. He joined or formed various quartets and other musical groups and travelled around the midwest to sing. In 1895, Joplin was in Syracuse, New York, selling two songs, Please Say You Will and A Picture of Her Face.
But despite all this travelling, his home base was in Sedalia, Missouri where he worked as a pianist in the Maple Leaf and Black 400 clubs, both social black clubs for respectable gentlemen.
By 1898 Joplin had sold six pieces for the piano, most very advanced tunes that were fine musically, but not anything special. Of the six, only Original Rags is a ragtime piece. The other five were two songs (mentioned previously), two marches, and a waltz.
In 1899, Joplin sold his most famous piece, Maple Leaf Rag to John Stark & Son, a Sedalia music publisher. Joplin received a one-cent royalty for each copy and ten free copies for his own use. It has been estimated the Joplin made $360 per year on this piece in his lifetime.
Maple Leaf Rag boosted Joplin to the top of the list of ragtime performers and moved ragtime into promeinence as a musical form. Joplin continued writing and publishing, and in those days before recorded music was a best-selling composer based on sales of sheet music. Joplin continued to experiment with other musical forms as well; after moving to New York City, Joplin attempted an ambitious ragtime opera, Treemonisha, which he produced himself at great personal expense.
Joplin wanted to experiment further with compositions like Treemonisha, but by 1916 he was suffering from the effects of terminal syphilis. He suffered later from dementia, paranoia, paralysis and other symptoms. Despite this, he recorded six piano rolls that year - Maple Leaf Rag (for Connorized and Uni-Record labels) Something Doing, Magnetic Rag, Ole Miss Rag, and Pleasant Moments (all for Connorized). These are the only records of his playing we have, and are interesting for the embellishments added by Joplin to his performances. A surviving copy of the 'Pleasant Moments' roll has not yet been discovered.
In mid-January he was hospitalized at Manhattan State Hospital in New York City, and friends recounted that he would have bursts of lucidity in which he would jot down lines of music hurriedly before relapsing. Joplin died there on April 1, 1917. His death did not make the headlines for two reasons: ragtime was quickly losing ground to jazz and the United States would enter World War I within days. He was buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in the Astoria section of Queens.
Joplin's musical papers, including unpublished manuscripts, were willed to Joplin's friend and the executor of his will, musician and composer Wilber Sweatman. Sweatman took care of these papers and generously shared access to them to those who enquired. However these were unfortunately few, since Joplin's music had come to be considered passe. After Sweatman's death in 1961 the papers were last known to go into storage during a legal battle among Sweatman's heirs; their current location is not known, nor even if they still exist.
After Joplin's death ragtime music experienced two bursts of popularity: once in the early 1950s when ragtime was regarded as a happy nostalgic music of a more innocent time. The second ragtime revival was prompted by the release of the movie The Sting in 1973, which despite being set in the 1930s still anachronistically featured a Joplin soundtrack and introduced new generations to his music. Marvin Hamlisch's adaptation of the Joplin song "The Entertainer" reached number 3 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 music chart in 1974, and a much wider and deeper interest in ragtime in general and Joplin in particular was created.
Joplin's music:
Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (ISBN 0195101081) -- the most authoritative book on Joplin's life.
The Mutopia project has freely downloadable piano scores of The Entertainer and Maple Leaf RagExternal link