Scott Joplin

His father Giles had been enslaved in North Carolina and had played the violin at plantation parties. His mother Florence was born free in Kentucky and sang and played banjo. In Texarkana, Giles laid railroad track and Florence cleaned houses, and from the age of seven the boy was allowed at the piano in the houses she cleaned. Julius Weiss, a German-born Jewish music professor employed as tutor to a prominent local family, heard him, understood exactly what the Joplins could pay, and taught him free from 11 to 16 — folk music, classical form, opera, and the idea that music was an art and not only an entertainment. Giles left the family for another woman in the early 1880s. Decades later, famous, Joplin was still sending Weiss money.

He was in Sedalia, Missouri by 1894, teaching piano to younger ragtime men and playing the Maple Leaf Club, and on August 10, 1899, he signed with the music dealer John Stark for a one percent royalty on a rag named for that club. The first run was 400 copies. It took a year to sell and earned him four dollars. Then the Maple Leaf Rag kept selling for the rest of his life and set the form for every rag composer who followed. The Entertainer and more than 40 other rags came after it, and a ragtime ballet. But what he wanted was opera. A Guest of Honor toured in 1903 and vanished when somebody stole the receipts and a boarding house kept the unpaid score. He published the second, Treemonisha, at his own expense in 1911.

Edward A. Berlin dates the first signs of syphilis to about 1903 — the year his only child, a daughter, died and his first marriage came apart. In June 1904 he married Freddie Alexander in Little Rock. She died on September 10, ten weeks after the wedding, of complications from a cold. He was also a composer who could not really play. Stark's own son called him a mediocre pianist, and he never worked the St. Louis saloons where pianists earned their living. In 1915 he gathered a small audience in a Harlem rehearsal hall to hear Treemonisha with no orchestra and himself at the keyboard. The backers walked out. He broke down, bankrupt and worn through. By 1916 the disease had reached his brain, and on February 2, 1917, he entered Manhattan State Hospital.

He died there on April 1, 1917, at 48, and went into a pauper's grave that stayed unmarked for 57 years. The rediscovery, when it came, came off the classical shelf. Joshua Rifkin's Scott Joplin: Piano Rags, released by Nonesuch in November 1970, sold 100,000 copies in its first year and became the label's first million seller; by September 1974 six of the top seven records on Billboard's classical chart were Joplin. Treemonisha was staged at last in 1972. The Sting won Best Picture in 1974, the same year somebody finally set a marker on the grave at St. Michael's Cemetery in Queens. In 1976 the Pulitzer board voted him a special award.

Scott Joplin's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Original Rags song
  His first published rag 1897
• Maple Leaf Rag song
  One percent royalty. Four dollars in the first year, then a lifetime of sales 1899
• The Entertainer song
  A number three Billboard hit in 1974 in Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement 1902
• A Guest of Honor other
  His first opera, lost on tour when the score was held for an unpaid bill 1903
• Bethena song
  A ragtime waltz copyrighted after his second wife's death 1905
• Treemonisha other
  Score and libretto both his. Self-published, unstaged until 1972 1911

• c. November 24, 1868 aged 0 Born in northeast Texas to a formerly enslaved father and a freeborn mother Berlin argues the real date falls between June 1867 and mid-January 1868.
• c. 1879 aged ~11 Julius Weiss begins teaching him, free of charge Five years of folk music, classical form and opera, ending when Joplin turned 16.
• 1894 aged ~26 Arrives in Sedalia, Missouri He taught Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell there.
• August 10, 1899 aged 30 Signs with John Stark for a one percent royalty on the Maple Leaf Rag
• 1903 aged ~35 His only child dies and A Guest of Honor is lost on tour
• September 10, 1904 aged 35 Freddie Alexander dies ten weeks after their wedding
• 1915 aged ~47 Treemonisha is heard once in a Harlem rehearsal hall and the audience leaves
• April 1, 1917 aged 48 Dies of syphilitic dementia at Manhattan State Hospital He had been admitted on February 2.
• November 1970 aged 101 Joshua Rifkin's Scott Joplin: Piano Rags starts the revival Nonesuch's first million-selling record, filed under classical.

• George Gershwin 1898–1937
  Composer who fused jazz, popular song, Broadway, and concert music into a distinctly American style. built on the form he set
• Irving Berlin 1888–1989
  Songwriter whose vast catalog, from 'God Bless America' to Broadway standards, helped define the American popular songbook. sold ragtime to the mass market he never reached
• Duke Ellington 1899–1974
  Composer and bandleader who expanded the artistic ambition and vocabulary of jazz. carried the same ambition into concert form
• Louis Armstrong 1901–1971
  Trumpeter and singer whose innovations and worldwide fame made jazz a central American art form. the music that followed ragtime out of the same country
• Bessie Smith 1892–1937
  Leading blues recording artist of the 1920s known as the Empress of the Blues. sang for the market his sheet music opened