Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin was born around November 1868 near Texarkana, Texas, into a musical family; his father was a formerly enslaved fiddler and his mother a singer and banjo player. His unusual musical talent was recognised early, and a local German-born music teacher, Julius Weiss, provided free lessons in classical piano technique and music theory, an education that would later give Joplin's ragtime compositions a distinctive formal sophistication uncommon in the genre.

Joplin worked as an itinerant musician through the American South and Midwest during the 1880s and 1890s, eventually settling in Sedalia, Missouri, where he studied formally at the George R. Smith College for Negroes and began seriously composing the syncopated piano music that would become known as ragtime, a genre blending African-American rhythmic traditions with European classical piano forms.

In 1899 Joplin published 'Maple Leaf Rag,' which became an enormous commercial success, reportedly the first instrumental sheet music to sell over a million copies, and effectively launched ragtime as a national musical craze that dominated American popular music for the following decade, making Joplin, almost overnight, the genre's most commercially successful and critically respected composer.

Joplin composed prolifically throughout the following years, publishing numerous additional rags including 'The Entertainer' (1902), while also pursuing more ambitious compositional projects beyond popular sheet music, including a ragtime ballet and two operas, reflecting his consistent ambition to have ragtime recognised as a legitimate art form worthy of the same critical seriousness as European classical music, an ambition that met with limited success and financial difficulty during his lifetime.

Joplin's second opera, Treemonisha, addressing themes of African-American education and self-determination in the post-Reconstruction South, was completed around 1910 but never received a fully staged production during his lifetime, a significant professional disappointment that reflected the era's limited institutional support for a Black composer's ambitious classical-scale work, regardless of his commercial success in popular sheet music.

Joplin died in 1917, his health severely declined from complications related to syphilis, and his significant financial difficulties in his final years reflected the gap between ragtime's massive popular commercial success and the limited compensation composers, particularly Black composers, typically received relative to that popularity. His reputation experienced a dramatic posthumous revival in the 1970s, when his music was prominently featured in the 1973 film The Sting, introducing his compositions to an entirely new generation and leading to a posthumous Pulitzer Prize special citation in 1976 and Treemonisha finally receiving full staged performances, decades after his death.