Listening to Joplin's own works in their original piano form and in orchestral transcriptions, I became captivated by the composer's charm and uniquely pungent rhythms.

Intriguing too was the pervasive classical influence evidenced in both form and harmonic content.

Though we cannot cite an exact date for his birth, documents place the event between July 19, 1867 and mid-January 1868.

...Joplin entered the world without fanfare, lacking even a perfunctory notice of his birth in the local newspaper.

...he helped revolutionize American music and culture.

He later commented, 'My attitude toward Joplin is not the same as it was thirty years ago. We see him now as one of the most important creators of his generation, certainly comparable to Schoenberg.'

The mass media of film, however, gave Joplin's work national notice and acclaim. Joplin compositions such as The Entertainer, Solace, and Pineapple Rag provided the musical backdrop for The Sting, a box-office success, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

In 1970 her focus turned to the music of Scott Joplin, and together with the New York Public Library, she published a two-volume set of his collected works. Lawrence's involvement with Joplin's music included a consultant position on the production of the posthumous premiere of his opera Treemonisha (1972).

Jiles's owner, Charles Moores, brought him to northeastern Texas in 1850 from South Carolina.

There he met Florence Givens, and in 1860 they married. Their first son, Monroe, was born sometime in the next couple of years as the nation exploded into civil war.

White people, for whose dances and entertainments African Americans like Joplin's father had played, expected to hear familiar waltzes, schottisches, polkas, quadrilles, and reels.

 As an employee of the railroad, Jiles made a good living for his family, which by 1880 included eight members.

At this wage, supplemented by Monroe's earnings as a porter in a store and Florence's housekeeping income, the Joplins may have been earning twice as much as they had on the farm.

In order to supplement her husband's income, Florence hired out as a domestic servant to white families in Texarkana, work which eventually redounded to the educational and musical benefit of her second son.

According to descendants of the Cook family, when Scott accompanied his mother to her work, he was given free use of the piano, an instrument on which he displayed amazing natural ability. In a short time he became known as something of a prodigy.

He undoubtedly introduced Joplin to the elements of opera and to works by classical composers.

...Jiles's opposition probably stemmed from the fact that Joplin's concentration on music took him away from some kind of practical employment, which would have supplemented the family's income in a more substantial way. Florence's encouragement of his musical ambitions angered her husband, and, as Joplin entered his teens, became the source of serious division within the family.

In spite of the tensions at home, Joplin immersed himself in the musical life of the community. He played music at church gatherings and at secular entertainments. It is likely that he played waltzes, polkas, and schottisches for African American dances, but he was known for the originality of his music.

Until he resurfaced in the 1890s in Missouri, Joplin's whereabouts are unknown and difficult to verify.

Indeed, one of Joplin's earliest written compositions was The Great Crush Collision, which he dedicated to the Missouri,  Kansas & Texas Railway.

The majestic buildings that had been built in Jackson Park to house the exhibits of the Columbian Exposition...

But in spite of their position on the periphery of the fair, Joplin and his ragtime cohort introduced millions of Americans to a kind of music that they soon clamored to hear.

The New York Symphony, the writer complained, 'played to only about 50 people, and vacant seats are the rule.'

...midway performers, like Joplin, were eager to provide popular music, and visitors  could not seem to get enough.

Joplin was too perceptive to have missed the discrimination against his people noted by Douglass, Wells, and other prominent African American leaders, but he himself realized significant triumphs at the fair. His music reached and apparently touched a class of people who, under other circumstances, either would not have had occasion to hear it or would have deliberately avoided it.

For example, it is believed that in Chicago Joplin met and became friends with Otis Saunders. It was Saunders, a Missourian, who eventually took Joplin to Sedalia and encouraged him to learn more about formal composition.

...Joplin formed his first band in Chicago. It probably included a cornet, a clarinet, a tuba, and a baritone horn. Moreover, he began developing his skills at notation, writing arrangements of popular pieces for his band. By the time of the closing of the exposition, Joplin must have been full of ideas for arranging and performing music that Americans wanted to hear.

According to one biographer, by 1895, the two musicians 'were convinced that Scott Joplin had a new music that the public wanted.

After the fair, composers like Joplin began experimenting with writing ragtime sheet music, thus making the music available to middle-class amateurs as well as professional performers.

The syncopated rhythm defied the usual order and regularity of three-quarter-time waltzes and dreamy ballads and the four-four time of marches and hymns. The steady beat of the left hand echoed the rhythm of factory, machine, and train, but the unexpected accents by the right hand, as well as the fast-paced melodies, announced a refusal to be contained by that steadiness.

The turmoil and celebration of 1893 would set the stage for Joplin's breathtaking rise to fame in Sedalia, Missouri, where, by the dawn of the new century, he would be known as the King of Ragtime.

Ragtime music, in general, and Maple Leaf Rag in particular, were the products of African American writers and/or influences. Americans who cakewalked or two-stepped to them were literally dancing to a black man's tune.

Indeed, by 1900, Scott Joplin and Belle Jones, who soon would become his wife, lived in a house owned by German immigrants, Michael Seethaler and his family.

The generous terms of the contract Stark gave Joplin have often been cited as evidence of Stark's warm regard for the black musician. Moreover, Stark's willingness to publish Joplin's music gave his work a wider hearing than he otherwise would have gotten.

According to S. Brunson Campbell, the African American's 'piano services were so much in demand to play for white and Negro parties and dances, that he surrounded himself with the crack Negro pianists of Sedalia and placed them on party and dance jobs.'

Most important, however, Joplin emphasized a written record of his musical compositions, which he achieved with greater alacrity after enrolling in an advanced composition course at the George R. Smith College for Negroes in the mid-1890s.
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His mastery of the principles of harmony and composition permitted Joplin to record and refine the improvisational works of his friends and no doubt contributed to his aspirations to write serious music.

Indeed, Hayden did not strike out on his own until June 1900, after Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag had begun to attract attention and after he and Joplin had begun working on their first compositions together.
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Moreover, Joplin helped Marshall with his compositions, offering advice on melody, bass, and harmony and putting the music in manuscript form.

Sunflower Slow Drag was the first collaboration between Joplin and Hayden. They later produced Something Doing (1903), Felicity Rag (1911), and Kismet Rag (1913). Marshall and Joplin wrote Swipesy Cake Walk (1900) and Lily Queen – A Ragtime Two-Step (1907).

In the immediate aftermath of his first publishing success, Joplin composed and taught music in Sedalia, where he had friends and followers among both blacks and whites.

...sometime in late 1900 or early 1901, in order to fulfill his contractual obligation to publish all his work with them...

...the Sedalia Weekly Conservator reported on Joplin's latest compositions, which by 1903 included Cleopha (1902), The Entertainer (1902), Elite Syncopations (1902), and Weeping Willow (1903), and noted that they 'can be heard in the evening on almost any avenue.'

It was for this reason that Joplin paid tribute to Roosevelt with his piano rag A Strenuous Life, and then tried to memorialize the event with his opera.

In August the Sedalia Weekly Conservator announced that the cast of Joplin's opera had begun daily rehearsals at Crawford's Theatre in East St. Louis, where they were scheduled to open on August 30, 1903.

He further noted that Joplin's recent works – Easy Winners (1901), The Ragtime Dance (1902), and Peacherine Rag (1901) – were used by the leading piano players and orchestras.

After the initial, short run of Maple Leaf Rag, Stark began to illustrate the jacket of the music with a simple, elegant maple leaf and dubbed Joplin the 'King of Ragtime Writers.'

On a personal level, Joplin's life was also on an upswing in 1900. He had married Belle Jones shortly before leaving the Queen City and settled into a new home with her in St. Louis with hopes of starting a family.

As early as 1899, Joplin had completed a ragtime ballet called The Ragtime Dance, a daring composition and performance concept that featured African American dance steps choreographed to vocal and piano accompaniment.

Three years later, after Joplin had written numerous successful compositions for the Starks, he staged a private showing of The Ragtime Dance, and this time, at the urging of Nellie Stark, John Stark agreed to publish it in 1902

Moreover, he organized the Scott Joplin Drama Company, which by August reportedly was 'rehearsing daily at Crawford's Theatre' in East St. Louis.
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...Joplin's chief problem lay in his inability to secure substantial backing for his venture

...disappearance as a coherent operatic work.

At the same time that he could find no one to bankroll the staging of ragtime ballet or opera, publishers eagerly issued two-steps, ragtime waltzes, and slow drags. Cleopha, A Breeze from Alabama, Elite Syncopations, The Entertainer, March Majestic, and The Strenuous Life, all appeared in 1902; and Weeping Willow, Palm Leaf Rag, Little Black Baby, Maple Leaf Rag – Song, and Something Doing with Scott Hayden came out the following year.

It is known that Mrs. Joplin had delivered a baby girl and that the child had lived only a few months. That tragedy may have been only the most dramatic event in a marriage that was in trouble for other reasons.
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Eventually the Joplins separated, and within a couple of years, Belle Joplin died.

...the King of Ragtime, whose home was in St. Louis, was offered no official place on the program.

None of the official compositions, however, achieved the popularity of Kerry Mills's Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis or Scott Joplin's The Cascades.

In June, his marriage with Belle having ended, Joplin returned to Arkansas and married Freddie Alexander in Little Rock.
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Tragically, Freddie developed a cold that progressed into pneumonia, and she died at the age of 20 on September 10, 1904, ten weeks after their marriage.

In addition to The Cascades, which offered a musical tribute to that popular attraction of the fair, Joplin published The Sycamore, The Chrysanthemum – An Afro-Intermezzo, and The Favorite in 1904. In the following year, he published Bethena, Leola, Binks' Waltz, Eugenia, and Sarah Dear, as well as the rag dedicated to Turpin.

Within a short time of these events, Joplin's days in St. Louis came to an end. In all of 1906 Joplin produced only one new number, Antoinette, and a shortened version of The Ragtime Dance...
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By 1906, the thirty-seven-year-old composer had lost his hold on family, students, friends, and that elusive hope for acclaim that had drawn him to St. Louis.

In addition to touring and performing, Joplin also cut piano rolls of his own compositions, including Maple Leaf Rag, Original Rags, Weeping Willows Rag, and Gladiolus Rag for such companies as Connorized, Uni-Record Melody, and Metro Art.          
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Such virtuosi as Artur Rubinstein, Leopold Godowsky, Ignacy Paderewski, and Claude Debussy cut piano rolls in the early twentieth century. Joplin thus joined elite company and prompted an association between his work and the work of famous musicians to substantiate his claim to serious musical consideration.

Despite these two demanding enterprises, in 1907 Joplin began once more to produce beautiful compositions, many of which evince, according to Rudi Blesh, an evolving maturity. In addition to Heliotrope Bouquet, which appeared in print in 1907, Joplin published another collaborative work, Lily Queen with Arthur Marshall, Gladiolus Rag, Nonpareil, and When Your Hair is Like the Snow in that year. In 1908, he published Sugar Cane, Pine Apple Rag, School of Ragtime – Six Exercises for Piano

Joseph W. Stern and Company, who had offices in Chicago, New York, and London, published Gladiolus Rag; Seminary Music Company of New York published Sugar Cane and Pine Apple Rag; and W.W. Stuart of New York published Lily Queen.

 They traveled together for a time but eventually moved into a house at 252 West Forty-Seventh Street, where the composer taught and worked on his own music while his wife ran a boardinghouse.

'But he was a great man, a great man! He wanted to be a real leader. He wanted to free his people from poverty and ignorance, and superstition, just like the heroine of his ragtime opera “Treemonisha.”'

In 1911, despairing of finding a publisher for Treemonisha, Joplin heedlessly undertook the financial burden of issuing the piano-vocal score himself. If the practical wisdom of this action is questionable, posterity must always be grateful for Joplin's improvidence.  Had he not published it, Treemonisha might have gone the way of A Guest of Honor.

Soon after he published Treemonisha in 1911, a review of his work appeared in The American Musician that said, in part, 'Scott Joplin has proved himself a teacher as well as a scholar and an optimist with a mission which has been splendidly performed.

In 1913, the New York Age announced that Benjamin Nibur, manager of the Lafayette Theatre, had agreed to stage the show sometime in the fall.

...such popular African American entertainers as Will Marion Cook, Henry S. Creamer, and Jesse Shipp.
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But in the end, Treemonisha did not open in the Lafayette Theatre in the autumn of 1913.

Joplin was out of step with the black community in other ways as well. He differed most apparently in musical style.

The writer lauded the speed pianists and dazzling performers and uttered not a word about composition or an American school of music. Joplin, of course, since writing the six exercises that made up School of Ragtime (1908), had been preaching to anyone who would listen to 'play slowly until you catch the swing, and never play ragtime fast at any time.'”

At the end of his career, Joplin diverted his attention away from performing and from the C.V.B.A. [Colored Vaudeville Benevolent Association] in order to concentrate on his opera, a musical comedy, and a symphony.' In 1914, Joplin also published an orchestral version of Magnetic Rag, which pointed to his desire to write serious scores rather than to compose for or perform as a dance-hall musician.

When Carl Van Vechten looked back on the black theater in Harlem in the 1910s, he praised My Friend from Kentucky as an effort 'to present the Negro as he really is and not as how he wants to be on the stage.' Set on a Virginia plantation, the show 'diffused a general atmosphere of black joy.'
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By contrast, Joplin's Treemonisha, set on an Arkansas plantation, presented rural life for blacks as socially isolated, intellectually stifling, and physically demanding.

From 1911 until the end of his life, Joplin put most of his energy into the opera. He published Scott Joplin's New Rag in 1912 and Magnetic Rag in 1914, and Stark issued a couple of collaborations between Joplin and Hayden – Felicity Rag (1911) and Kismet Rag (1913).

In 1915 Joplin staked everything on a last desperate effort to attract backers and presented an informal audition of the Treemonisha score at a small rehearsal hall in Harlem for an invited audience.  This run-through - it could scarcely be called a performance - was as close as Joplin ever got to hearing Treemonisha performed.  Lacking staging or an orchestra (Joplin accompanied at the piano), the effort was a miserable failure.  The audience's bored indifference and total incomprehension dealt Joplin the final crushing blow from which he never recovered.  His mental deterioration, already well along, now progressed rapidly, and in 1916 his wife, finally realizing that his condition was hopeless, committed him to Manhattan State Hospital...

Like his friend Louis Chauvin before him, Joplin began to display symptoms associated with the advanced stages of syphilis, and as a result, his work in 1916 took place in short frenzied bursts, usually not sustained enough for him to complete a project or to maintain interest in or the loyalty of his students.

...Joplin was hospitalized for dementia, and on April 1, 1917, he died. Quiet services were held at the 'undertaking establishment of G. O. Paris, 116 West One Hundred Thirty-First Street,' and Lottie Joplin refused to permit the playing of Maple Leaf Rag, a decision she later regretted. The King of Ragtime left the world almost as quietly and obscurely as he had entered it.

In his opera, Joplin joined a timely discussion of the best road to advancement for African Americans in the early twentieth century.”

And in the 1880s, each started a 'career as a teacher and leader.'

Its fundamental message is that education is essential for freedom.

In act 3, Treemonisha completes the lesson by discouraging her neighbors from punishing her kidnappers. In such lecture songs as 'Treemonisha's Return' and 'Wrong Is Never Right,' Joplin blends simple morality with logical thinking as a lesson for the African American community. Hard work is celebrated as are Christian forgiveness and educated leaders.

The single greatest legacy of Scott Joplin is the body of music he created. From short piano compositions to extended efforts like ragtime ballet and grand opera, Joplin's music represents the meeting of two musical traditions – the structures of Western serious music and rhythms of nineteenth-century African American communities.

One important legacy of the King of Ragtime, then, is his contribution to the development of a distinctive American music in the early twentieth century; he was one of the architects of an American school of music.

An authentic player piano fills the air with Scott Joplin melodies as you walk through the modest flat on Delmar Boulevard that Joplin and his wife Belle lived in during their time in St. Louis. Lit by gaslight, the home is furnished as it would have been in 1902 when Joplin was composing songs that would make him a national phenomenon. Scott Joplin House State Historic Site, which stands as a testimony to his talent and hard work, also includes museum exhibits that interpret Joplin’s life.

The Atlanta production ran for two consecutive nights to full (and mixed) houses in late January 1972. This was the original version via T.J. Anderson.

In writing “Treemonisha” - the libretto was his own – Joplin clearly intended to author a social as well as musical document. He set up the forces of ignorance and superstition against liberalism and education represented by a young lady named Treemonisha.

Morehouse College, aided by a Rockefeller grant, gave “Treemonisha” an ambitious performance. Thomas J. Anderson, a visiting professor at the college, orchestrated the opera in a style that follows the one example of Joplin's orchestration that has come down to us.

This slow drag is amazing. Harmonically enchanting, full of the tensions of an entire race, rhythmically catching, it refuses to leave the mind. Talk about soul music!

A special award is bestowed posthumously on Scott Joplin, in this Bicentennial Year, for his contributions to American music.

Joy - no other word better describes the feeling that the music of Scott Joplin evokes from the listener and the performer.  This joy, however, is tinged with irony, for these pieces were composed by a man whose life was in many respects one of frustration and tragedy.  An African American who sought both legitimacy and recognition for ragtime as an art form, Joplin was doubly cursed by his dream.