Scott Joplin (?? 1867 to April 1, 1917)
Ragtime Compositions
1896 Great Crush Collision Combination March Harmony Club Waltz 1899 Original Rags Maple Leaf Rag 1900 Swipsey Cake Walk [1] 1901 Sunflower Slow Drag [2] Peacherine Rag Augustan Club Waltz The Easy Winners 1902 Cleopha A Breeze From Alabama Elite Syncopations The Entertainer March Majestic The Strenuous Life The Ragtime Dance (Song) 1903 Something Doing [2] Weeping Willow Palm Leaf Rag 1904 The Favorite The Sycamore The Cascades The Chrysanthemum 1905 Bethena Rosebud March Leola Binks' Waltz Eugenia 1906 Antoinette The Ragtime Dance (Rag)	1907 Lily Queen [1] Heliotrope Bouquet [3] Searchlight Rag Gladiolus Rag Rose Leaf Rag Nonpariel 1908 Fig Leaf Rag Sugar Cane Pine Apple Rag 1909 Wall Street Rag Solace Pleasant Moments Country Club Euphonic Sounds Paragon Rag 1910 Stoptime Rag 1911 Felicity Rag [2] 1912 Scott Joplin's New Rag 1911 Kismet Rag [2] 1914 Magnetic Rag Treemonisha     Frolic of the Bears     Prelude to Act 3     A Real Slow Drag 1917 (Posth) Reflection Rag 1970 (Posth) Silver Swan Rag (191?)    1. w/Arthur Marshall    2. w/Scott Hayden    3. w/Louis Chauvin
Songs
1895 Please Say You Will A Picture of Her Face 1902 I Am Thinking of My Pickaninny    Days [4] 1903 Little Black Baby [w/Louise Armstrong    Bristol] 1904 Maple Leaf Rag Song [w/Sydney Brown] 1905 Sarah Dear [4]	1906 Good Bye Old Gal, Good Bye [Mac    Darden/H. Carroll Taylor] [5] 1907 Snoring Sampson [Harry La Mertha] [5] When Your Hair is Like the Snow    [w/Owen Spendthrift] 1910 Pine Apple Rag Song [w/Joe Snyder] 1911 Lovin' Babe [Al R. Turner] [5]    4. w/Henry Jackson    5. arr. by Scott Joplin
Known Lost Works
1901 A Blizzard 1903 A Guest of Honor: Opera     Dude's Parade     Patriotic Patrol     Song/Inst based on Antoinette 1905 You Stand Good With Me, Babe	c.1915? Morning Glories For the Sake of All Syncopated Jamboree (Stage Presentation) Pretty Pansy Rag Recitative Rag c.1916? If (Musical Comedy) Symphony No. 1 Piano Concerto
Piano Rolls
4/1916 Maple Leaf Rag [Connorized 10256] Magnetic Rag [Connorized 10266] 5/1916 Weeping Willow [Connorized 10277] Something Doing [Connorized 10278] Pleasant Moments [Connorized 10319] 6/1916 Maple Leaf Rag [Uni-Record melody 202705] Ole Miss Rag [by W.C. Handy] [Connorized 10304]

     Scott Joplin, who was dubbed "The King of Ragtime Writers" early in his composing career, earned the title through diligence, innovation, and sheer talent. Although he was not entirely responsible for helping lower many of the barriers that stood between black composers and success, Joplin was a leader in this regard, if a passive one.
     He was born in eastern Texas near Linden. The true birth date is unknown, and the common one of November 24 1868 was suggested by his last wife Lottie, although it was likely between July 19. 1867 (the day after the 1870 Census listing him as 2 years old) and mid-January of 1868 according to historian and Joplin biographer Ed Berlin. The June, 1880 Census lists him as 12 years old, further reinforcing this probability, and the 1900 Census lists him with an October birth date, although in 1872, a curiosity for certain.
     Scott Joplin grew up in the uncertain era of reconstruction. His father, Giles Joplin (sometimes spelled Jiles), was a slave that was freed before the Civil War, and his mother, Florence, was freeborn. During Scott's first few years, his parents worked as tenant farmers. As the family grew, his father got a job with the railroad in Texarkana, and his mother took up house cleaning. Both parents were musical, and Scott learned to play the banjo at an early age. His obvious musical talent earned him offers from area piano teachers to tutor him for free. By the age of 12 he was competent at both interpreting and writing music. His father left home around that time to take up residence with another woman, but stayed minimally involved to some extent in Scott's life. He appears in the 1880 Census still with the family as a common laborer so he may have left within the year. The same record shows Florence and oldest son Monroe working as well, with Scott and Robert in school. The youngest Joplin, Johnny, is only 3 months old when the Census was taken in mid June. The Scott helped his mother raise his siblings, but always followed his passion for music. There are suggestions by Ed Berlin that during his mid to late teens he spent some time in Sedalia, likely with a relative, but came back at some point to Texarkana. Around age 19 or 20 he left home for good.
     Scott spent the next few years as an itinerant pianist, developing his own style while absorbing influences of other Midwest musicians. He spent a great deal of time based in St. Louis, and went to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition (World's Fair) in 1893. It was here that ragtime music, then in its infancy, was most likely heard by the public, and by many other musicians as well for the first time. After the fair, Joplin formed various bands and singing groups, including the Texas Medley Quartette which featured his two of his younger brothers, Robert and Will. After spending a little more time in St. Louis, Joplin settled for a time in Sedalia, Missouri in 1897, a move that would change his life. Already a published composer with some songs to his credit, he attended the George R. Smith College (founded to encourage higher education for African Americans) to further his musical knowledge. It was possibly there that he learned how to more accurately notate syncopation, a necessity for correctly writing down his ragtime compositions for others to play. Joplin performed in many area venues during this time both as a solo performer and with varying sizes of groups playing either piano or cornet. It was while working in one of these venues in 1899, the short-lived Maple Leaf Club, that he allegedly became involved with one of his greatest champions, publisher John Stark, and at the very least where he found the name for his first truly inspired rag.
     Stark was impressed enough by Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag that he quickly published it, giving the composer a royalty (.01˘ per copy), which was unusual at this time, more so since Joplin was a black composer working with a white publisher. Since it was likely a lawyer friend of Joplin's that helped make the contact with Stark and drew up the contract, it may have been a mutually agreed upon point that not only provided protection for both parties, but would eventually alter Joplin's financial well-being, allowing him to spend more time composing. Stark further encouraged Joplin to bring him more compositions, of which the collaborative Sunflower Slow Drag may have been submitted around the same time. The Maple Leaf was nearly an instant hit locally, and over the next two decades became the first piano rag to reportedly sell a million copies, although when that mark was reached is unclear. Although the relationship between Stark and Joplin would often be strained over much of the next 18 years, the publisher always promoted Joplin's works as the finest in his catalog. Those periods of animosity between them are in part demonstrated by name of varying publishers at the bottom of each new Joplin rag.
     In the 1900 Census Joplin is listed as a musician, with his birthday curiously put down as October of 1872, and his age as 27. He was lodging in the home of Susan H. Hankins, who was also hosting Belle Hayden Jones, the recently widowed sister-in-law of one of his young students, Scott Hayden. Just before he moved to St. Louis in 1901, Joplin (as some evidence suggests) possibly married Belle, and it may have also been a common-law marriage. The year of 1902 found Joplin at odds with Stark over publication of an extended rag ballet intended for stage or social events, which had evidently been performed as early as 1900 in Sedalia. Stark grudgingly published this long version of The Ragtime Dance, which had been orchestrated and performed in St. Louis as well by this time, due largely to the prompting of his daughter Eleanor, but it did poorly as Stark expected. Still, with profits from the other rags in his catalog, John Stark was able to open a music store and publishing plant in St. Louis, and eventually an office New York for a few years. Joplin wrote an early ragtime opera finished in 1903 called A Guest of Honor (likely based on a formal visit to the Roosevelt White House by Booker T. Washington), and toured with it briefly in the late summer and fall of 1903. Although no score has been re-discovered, remnants potentially remain in the form of a rag and march, and some titles are known at the very least. Joplin and Belle had been at odds for some time in St. Louis. After they had a baby girl that died at two months, the couple became estranged. Belle later moved from St. Louis and lived until 1930 or so.
     At some point after the money-losing Guest of Honor tour, Joplin spent up to a few months in Chicago before returning to St. Louis. By the time the 1904 World's Fair opened in late April, he was probably back in Sedalia for a time. Sometime during this period he met a 19 year-old in Little Rock that had capture his heart. He married Freddie Alexander, who he had dedicated the first printing of the Chrysanthemum to, in late June, and traveled with her back to Sedalia, playing concerts along the way. However, as soon as the reached Sedalia in July, Freddie was confined to bed for a cold that developed into pneumonia, and which took her life in early September. This started a period of compositional malaise and possibly depression for the composer, who soon moved back to St. Louis. Subsequent printings of Chrysanthemum also had the dedication removed. By this time, John Stark had set up shop in New York in an effort to compete with larger publishers who were putting out ragtime inferior (his staunch belief) to what was in his catalog. Joplin eventually followed Stark to New York in 1907, never to return to the Midwest.
     Some of Joplin's best-developed works are from the period 1907 to 1910, and they demonstrate the versatility of classic ragtime as well as a variety of textures that could be achieved within that framework. It was during this time that he met and allegedly married Lottie Stokes, although even approximate dates for this are unclear. He appears in the April 1910 Census as a musician and composer in Manhattan, plus widowed as would be consistent with the loss of Freddie. The wedding date of June of that year, as reported by Brun Campbell, would be most consistent with the time line, but inconsistent with other factors, such as her using her maiden name on a legal document in 1913. They were possibly never formally married, but she does appear as Lottie Joplin starting with the 1920 Census. There is some possibility that Lottie, born and raised in Washington DC, was married before she moved to Manhattan to run her boarding house, which would explain why she is hard to locate before 1913 when the two obviously were in a close relationship.
     Joplin continued work on a project that had been in his mind for many years and would consume much of the rest of his life. He believed so much in his syncopated opera Treemonisha that he put everything he had into it, both emotionally and financially. Funding and support was hard to come by because so many investors were involved with Broadway shows offering more popular music, and those investing in opera were going for proven projects. Treemonisha, a story ahead of its time as it involves female leadership and has a strong message of education as a way to gain respect and equal rights among all men, ultimately had only one performance for potential investors in 1911 with Joplin playing in place of an orchestra and a bare stage set. (Treemonisha was successfully staged for the first time as originally intended in 1972 with a full scale re-orchestrated presentation in 1975 by the Houston Grand Opera).
     Emotionally discouraged and mentally affected by the onset of syphilis, Joplin spent his remaining years, particularly 1915 on, slowly deteriorating physically and suffering from the onset of dementia. In early 1916 he did manage at least two different sessions where he recorded a handful of piano rolls, including Maple Leaf Rag, W.C. Handy's Ole Miss Rag, and his waltz Pleasant Moments. All but one of these are not accurate indicators of how he would have been playing at that time since they were obviously edited for timing and other errors. The exception is one of his Maple Leaf Rag performances which is uneven and halting at times, but it may have also been edited to some extent. Without an audio recording it is hard to determine exactly how he played, and between even 1914 and 1916 there would have been some significant differences. Joplin finally succumbed to the disease on April 1, 1917, six weeks after having been committed to Bellevue Hospital. Lottie Joplin long regretted not fulfilling her husband's insistent request that the Maple Leaf Rag be played at his funeral. Nonetheless, his music remains an inherent part of American music history, and his contributions to not just Black Americans but to all Americans are long lasting.
     As for what happened to some of Joplin's remaining papers and works, including some unpublished manuscripts, has also long been somewhat of a mystery. This includes the status of A Guest of Honor, but also some unfinished rags or songs. It is reported that historian Rudi Blesh saw some of them when visiting Lottie during his interviews in 1949 for They All Played Ragtime, and he jotted down some of the titles, many shown in the listings included here. The status of that box of papers since then is unknown, but speculations vary from being stolen to being accidentally left out in the trash to simply having been acquired by a new building owner who may have disposed of them not knowing what was there. The most significant discovery after his death was of Silver Swan Rag, which existed only in piano roll form. The initial copy found in the late 1960s was not properly credited, but once the news was out that it may be a Joplin roll, other copies surfaced with the proper attribution. New information does pop up from time to time, but the bulk of what we know about Joplin's life has likely been found by now, one of the best collections being detailed in King of Ragtime by Dr. Edward Berlin. But many discoveries remain for future generations, perhaps in new ways to interpret his pieces, and perhaps other writings that have not yet surfaced.

     Much of the best and most accurate information about Scott Joplin can be found in the well-researched and compelling book King of Ragtime by Dr. Edward Berlin, which can be found on my Books on Ragtime page. If you have any interest in Joplin or ragtime music, then it should be in your library as well.