Scott Joplin

Born around 1868 in northeast Texas to a formerly enslaved father and a freeborn mother, Scott Joplin grew up surrounded by music and ended his short life as the most important American composer of his generation. As a teenager in Texarkana he studied with a German immigrant tutor named Julius Weiss, absorbing European harmony and form, then carried that grounding into the saloons and clubs of the Mississippi Valley — Sedalia, St. Louis, Chicago — where he transmuted march tempo, European structure, and African American syncopation into something entirely new: ragtime.

“Maple Leaf Rag,” published in 1899 through Sedalia publisher John Stark, became the first piece of instrumental sheet music in U.S. history to sell over a million copies. “The Entertainer” followed in 1902. But Joplin was never a saloon hustler; he was a craftsman with operatic ambitions. He composed two operas — A Guest of Honor (1903, score now lost) and Treemonisha (1911) — and spent years arguing for ragtime to be taken seriously as concert music. Against the demands of every dance hall in America, he insisted his rags be played slowly. It is never right to play ‘ragtime’ fast, he printed on the cover of his scores. Tempo was theology.

He died on April 1, 1917, at Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island, broken by complications of syphilis, his work nearly forgotten. He is buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, Queens — a New York footnote for half a century, until pianist Joshua Rifkin’s 1970 Nonesuch LP Piano Rags by Scott Joplin sold hundreds of thousands of copies and Marvin Hamlisch’s 1973 adaptations for The Sting put “The Entertainer” back into every American living room. In 1976 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Joplin belongs on vinyl. His resurrection was a vinyl resurrection — a generation of listeners discovering, on Nonesuch and RCA pressings, that ragtime was never novelty music. It was a deliberate, carefully-voiced art form built for patient ears. Played at the right tempo, on a good system, in a small dark room — the ritual a vinyl listening bar built itself around, the kissa tradition transplanted to MacDougal Street — Joplin reveals himself as what he always was: an architect, a syncopator, the first great American composer who insisted you listen on his terms.