Scott Joplin, “The King of Ragtime”, was an American composer and pianist. He is often accredited for upgrading and introducing “banjo piano”, a plebian form of entertainment often affiliated to salons and brothels, to elite American art form. During his brief career, he wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. He is best remembered for his tune, "The Entertainer", which was popularized in the movie The Sting (1973).
Background
Scott Joplin was the second of the six children born to Giles Joplin and Florence Givins near Linden, Texas. While for many years his date of birth was thought to be November 24, 1868, new research by ragtime historian Ed Berlin has revealed that this is inaccurate. Scott Joplin's exact date of birth and location is not known, though it is estimated that he was born between the summer of June 1867 and January 1868.
Joplin’s father, Giles, was a railroad laborer who was born into slavery and obtained his freedom five years before his son’s birth. Florence Givens Joplin was a freeborn black woman who worked as a laundress when not taking care of her children.
Scott Joplin’s siblings were Monroe, Robert, Rose, William, and Johnny. The first post-slavery generation of African Americans was represented clearly during the birth of Scott Joplin. When Joplin was seven years old, the family moved over to Texarkana where Giles was employed as a railroad employee and Florence took up cleaning and laundry washing as a source of additional income for the family.
The Joplins were a musical family, with Florence being a singer and banjo player and Giles a violinist; Scott learned how to play the guitar at a young age and later took to the piano, displaying a gift for the instrument.
At some point in the early 1880s, Giles Joplin left the family for another woman. His wife Florence struggled to support her children through domestic work. Biographer Susan Curtis speculated that the mother's support of Joplin's musical education was critical to the parents' separation. Joplin's father wanted the boy to pursue practical employment that would supplement the family income.
Education
The family had a musical setup that fueled Joplin’s passion for music. Giles knew how to play the violin and trained him and his brothers on the same. Florence also used to sing and play the banjo, thus creating a musical backdrop for Joplin’s talent.
By 1882 his mother had purchased a piano. Showing musical ability at an early age, the young Joplin received piano lessons for free from a German music teacher, who gave him a well-rounded knowledge of classical music form. When Joplin’s mother was away for work, he used to play piano in the neighbor’s house and also in the house of an attorney. His teachers included Mag Washington, John C. Johnson, and Julius Weiss, a German immigrant who taught him piano technique and exposed him to the European opera music that influenced his later compositions.
Since there weren’t many schools in the Southern United States and the ones available were not open to the African Americans, he could not go to school until his ten years.
Joplin enrolled at the George R. Smith College, where he apparently studied "...advanced harmony and composition." The College records were destroyed in a fire in 1925, and biographer Edward A. Berlin notes that it was unlikely that a small college for African-Americans would be able to provide such a course.
Joplin left home during his teen years and began work as a traveling musician, playing in bars and dance halls where new musical forms were featured that formed the basis of ragtime, which had distinct, syncopated rhythms and a fusion of musical sensibilities. Joplin lived for a time in Sedalia, Missouri in the 1880s and in 1893 he fronted a band in Chicago during the World Fair. He later settled in Sedalia again while continuing to travel, with the waltzes Please Say You Will and A Picture of Her Face becoming his first two published songs.
He published his first piano rag, Original Rags, in the late 1890s, but was made to share credit with another arranger. Joplin then worked with a lawyer to ensure that he would receive a one-cent royalty of every sheet-music copy sold of his next composition, The Maple Leaf Rag. In 1899, Joplin partnered with publisher John Stark to push the tune. Though sales were initially slight, it went on to become the biggest ragtime song ever, eventually selling more than a million copies.
Joplin focused on composing more ragtime works, with the genre taking the country by storm and Joplin earning acclaim for his artistry. Some of Joplin's published compositions over the years included The Entertainer, Peacherine Rag, Cleopha, The Chrysanthemum, The Ragtime Dance, Heliotrope Bouquet, Solace and Euphonic Sounds.
Joplin was intensely concerned with making sure the genre received its proper due, taking note of the disparaging comments made by some white critics due to the music's African-American origins and radical form. As such, he published a 1908 series that broke down the complexities of ragtime form for students: The School of Ragtime: Six Exercises for Piano.
Joplin also aspired to produce long-form works. He published the ballet Rag Time Dance in 1902 and created his first opera, A Guest of Honor, for a Midwestern tour in 1903. The production was shut down due partially to the theft of box-office receipts, with Joplin ultimately dealing with great financial losses.
Moving to New York City in 1907, Joplin wrote an instruction book, The School of Ragtime, outlining his complex bass patterns, sporadic syncopation, stop-time breaks, and harmonic ideas, which were widely imitated. By 1907, Joplin had settled in New York to work on securing funding for another opera he had created, Treemonisha, a multi-genre theatrical project which told the story of a rural African-American community near Texarkana. A precursor to George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Treemonisha was presented in 1915 as a scaled-down production with voice and piano, but would not receive a full-stage treatment for years to come.
Joplin continued to work on various musical forms and formed his own publishing company with his third wife, Lottie, in 1913.
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).
In 1916, Joplin descended into dementia as a result of syphilis. He was admitted to a mental institution in January 1917 and died there three months later at the age of 49. Joplin's death is widely considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format, and in the next several years it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz, and eventually big band swing. His music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of a million-selling album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award-winning 1973 movie The Sting that featured several of his compositions including "The Entertainer". The opera Treemonisha was finally produced in full to wide acclaim in 1972. In 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Scott Joplin’s works include the ballet and two operas, ‘The School Of Ragtime’ (1908) which was a manual, and also numerous works for piano that comprises of ‘Maple Leaf’, ‘The Entertainer’, ‘Elite Syncopations’ and ‘Peacherine’, marches like ‘Great Crush Collision’, ‘March Majestic’, and waltzes like ‘Harmony Club’ and ‘Bethena’. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Scott Joplin’s works had gained recognition and appeared in the New York Public Library in 1971. He also won the Academy Award for the motion picture in 1973, ‘The Sting’ for its film score. ‘Treemonisha’ was the opera that got him the Pulitzer Prize.
The home Joplin rented in St. Louis from 1900 to 1903 was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1976 and was saved from destruction by the local African American community. In 1983, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources made it the first state historic site in Missouri dedicated to African American heritage. At first, it focused entirely on Joplin and ragtime music, ignoring the urban milieu which shaped his musical compositions. A newer heritage project has expanded coverage to include the more complex social history of black urban migration and the transformation of a multi-ethnic neighborhood to the contemporary community. Part of this diverse narrative now includes coverage of uncomfortable topics of racial oppression, poverty, sanitation, prostitution, and sexually transmitted diseases.
In 1989 Joplin received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. In 2002 a collection of Joplin's own performances recorded on piano rolls in the 1900s (decade) was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. The board annually selects songs that are "...culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Although Scott was not an atheist, he also never seemed to be religious.
Views
Joplin met with opposition to his chosen art form throughout his life. The fact that Joplin was black does not account for all of this opposition since the black clergy crusaded against his music. Ragtime was seen as degenerate and even dangerous to the moral health of the nation. It was, in fact, music that was performed frequently in brothels. Joplin’s reaction to all of this was an apparent rejection of organized religion.
He believed that education was the key to the advancement of Afro-Americans.
Quotations:
"What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians."
"Never play ragtime fast at any time."
Personality
Scott Joplin was a quiet, serious man. He spoke seldom and softly, but with a refined pronunciation and vocabulary that impressed those whom he met. He was regarded as a kind, pleasant, modest, and inspiring man.
Connections
Joplin married Belle Hayden in 1901, and the couple followed Stark to his new piano store in St. Louis. Joplin divorced his first wife in 1904. He married his second wife, Freddie Alexander, in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on June 14, 1904, but she died of pneumonia ten weeks later.
In 1909, Joplin married Lottie Stokes.
Father:
Giles Joplin
Mother:
Florence Givens
Spouse:
Lottie Stokes
collaborator:
Scott Hayden
ex-spouse:
Belle Hayden
late spouse:
Freddie Alexander
teacher:
Julius Weiss
Weiss taught Scott free of charge. He tutored the 11-year-old Joplin until the boy was 16, during which time Weiss introduced him to folk and classical music, including opera. Weiss helped Joplin appreciate music as an "art as well as entertainment," and helped his mother acquire a used piano. According to Weiss' wife, Lottie, Joplin never forgot Weiss. In his later years, after achieving fame as a composer, Joplin sent his former teacher "...gifts of money when he was old and ill," until Weiss died.
