Maple Leaf Rag crowned a Texarkana railroad laborer’s son
Scott Joplin, who died in 1917 after a life begun around 1868, earned the ragtime crown with dozens of piano pieces, a ballet, and two operas. His Maple Leaf hit defined the craze after he quit railroad work to tour and settle in Sedalia, Missouri.
Joplin was the second of six children of Giles Joplin, formerly enslaved in North Carolina, and Florence Givens, born free in Kentucky. Early biographers gave his birthday as 24 November 1868, but Edward A. Berlin places it between mid-1867 and early 1868, and the 1870 census finds him as a toddler in Linden, Texas. By 1880 the family lived in Texarkana, where his father laid track and his mother cleaned houses; from age seven he was allowed to play the piano while she worked. His father later left, possibly in part over Florence’s backing for the boy’s music.
His real teacher was Julius Weiss, a German-born Jewish music professor who taught him free from age 11 to 16, introduced him to opera, and helped the family buy a used piano. Joplin later sent the old man money until his death. In the late 1880s he quit railroad labour to roam the South as a pianist, played cornet in a band at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and settled in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894.
On 10 August 1899 he signed with the music dealer John Stark for the Maple Leaf Rag at a 1% royalty. Legends of huge instant sales are false: the first 400 copies took a year to sell and earned him about a dollar, though steady later sales covered his costs. Joplin regarded ragtime as concert music and disliked hearing it bashed out in saloons. His first opera, A Guest of Honor, was seized with his belongings over unpaid bills and is lost.
He moved to New York in 1907, failed to find a producer for a new opera, and sank into dementia from syphilis before dying in 1917. Joshua Rifkin’s million-selling album and the 1973 film The Sting revived him, Treemonisha was staged in 1972, and a Pulitzer followed in 1976.
Source: Scott Joplin
