Marshall remembered his teacher as "a quiet person with perfect manners who loved music and liked to talk about it." He was "a brother in kindness to all." He also mentored and collaborated with younger black musicians such as Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden. He performed with the Queen City Band, an all-black group that provided music for various public entertainments, and played in clubs, brothels, dance halls, and at private parties. Joplin enrolled in music courses at the black institution and began performing in various settings in Sedalia along with other talented African American musicians, earning a reputation as a popular entertainer and composer of ragtime music. More significantly, perhaps, for the black musician, Sedalia was the home of the George R. Joplin's music literally struck a chord with a generation ready to shake off the vestiges of nineteenth-century propriety by kicking up its heels to the exuberant strains of ragtime.įollowing the World's Columbian Exposition, Joplin made his way to Sedalia, Missouri, an important railhead in the east-central part of the Show-Me State. Moreover, the 1890s economic depression, which affected the middle class as well as the underpaid or unemployed working class, sparked a nationwide questioning of the long-held American belief in self-denial and personal restraint. Ragtime's misplaced accents, its complex melodies that flowed from bass to treble and back, and the flurry of its notes invited toe-tapping, knee-slapping, head-bobbing movement from those who heard it it was perfect for the flashy strutting of the popular cakewalk. He was convinced that his rhythmically daring music had a ready, eager audience.
Oral histories place him at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where he tried out some of his arrangements with a newly formed band performing, no doubt, in the city's tenderloin district. It also is not known where he worked and lived before he gained fame in Sedalia, Missouri, in the 1890s. It is not known exactly when Scott Joplin left Texarkana, but sometime in the 1880s he set out to make his living as an itinerant musician. He made up his own, and it was beautiful he just got his music out of the air." As one contemporary later recalled, "He did not have to play anybody else's music. Joplin began performing as an adolescent, impressing those who heard him with the originality of his music. As his talent developed, he began studying with a German music teacher (thought most probably to be Julius Weiss) from whom he learned the basic elements of serious European compositions and the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies on which they depended. When the Joplins moved to Texarkana, which had sprung into existence in the early 1870s at the junction of the Texas & Pacific and Cairo & Fulton Railroads, Scott not only attended school but also learned to play the piano belonging to a wealthy family whose house his mother cleaned. As a youngster he heard black work songs, spirituals, and ring shouts, as well as the European waltzes, schottishes, and marches that black musicians like his father performed at white parties and dances. Born near Linden, Texas, in 1868, the second son of sharecroppers Jiles and Florence Joplin, the future composer grew up amid former slaves and their rich musical traditions. Moderwell, one of Joplin's contemporaries, called ragtime the "folk music of the American city," and John Stark, the publisher of Maple Leaf Rag, dubbed Joplin the "King of Ragtime Writers."Īlthough he was unquestionably born with a musical gift, Joplin's genius must be attributed at least partly to childhood influences from the region of his birth.
After 1900, ragtime music emerged as the first nationally recognized American music, and Tin Pan Alley publishers flooded the popular sheet music market with thousands of snappy, syncopated songs and piano pieces. He helped establish the conventional structure of ragtime compositions and successfully blended familiar genres of European music with African American rhythms and melodies into a genuine musical hybrid. Best known during his lifetime for Maple Leaf Rag (1899), Joplin wrote some two dozen compositions in the catchy, syncopated style that served as accompaniment to cakewalk dancing, to new forms of urban sporting life, and to a more generalized revolt against nineteenth-century gentility and restraint.
As a pioneering African American composer of ragtime music, Scott Joplin took part in a musical revolution in America at the turn of the twentieth century and left an enduring mark on the musical culture of the country.
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