Scott Joplin was an American musician and composer of ragtime music. He remains the best-known ragtime figure and is regarded as one of the three most important composers of classic ragtime, along with James Scott and Joseph Lamb.

When Joplin was learning the piano, serious musical circles condemned ragtime because of its association with the vulgar and inane songs “cranked out by the tune-smiths of Tin Pan Alley.” As a composer Joplin refined ragtime, elevating it above the low and unrefined form played by the “wandering honky tonk pianists… playing mere dance music” of popular imagination. This new art form, the Classic rag, combined Afro-American folk music’s sycopation and nineteenth-century European romanticism, with its harmonic schemes and its march-like tempos.  In the words of one critic,”Ragtime was basically… an Afro-American version of the polka, or its analog, the Sousa-style march.

In the late 1880s Joplin played pre-ragtime ‘jig-piano’ in various red-light districts throughout the mid-South.

In 1893 Joplin made his way to Chicago to perform at the World’s Fair, although not as an official performer. By 1897 ragtime had become a national craze in American cities, and was described by the Dispatch News as “a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city bred people.”

Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri in 1894 and began working as a pianist in the Maple Leaf Club and the Black 400, social clubs for “respectable [black] gentlemen”. He gained a reputation as a well-respected piano player, and began composing songs and teaching music. One of his earliest works in 1896 was The Great Crush Collision March, a “special… early essay in ragtime”, written after a staged train crash in McLennan County, Texas, at which Joplin may have been present.

In 1899, Joplin married Belle, the sister-in-law of collaborator Scott Hayden and sold what would soon become one of his most famous pieces, Maple Leaf Rag, to John Stark & Son, a Sedalia music publisher. It was an immediate success and was ragtime’s first hit, in addition to being the first great instrumental music hit in America.

Maple Leaf Rag:

Jazz Piano:

Joplin collaborated with Scott Hayden in the composition of four rags. It was in St. Louis that Joplin produced some of his best-known works, including The Entertainer, March Majestic, and the short theatrical work The Ragtime Dance.

In 1907 Scott Joplin moved to New York City, which he believed was the best place to find a producer for a new opera. In 1907 Scott Joplin moved to New York City, which he believed was the best place to find a producer for a new opera (Treemonisha). Though it encompasses a wide range of musical styles other than ragtime, and Joplin himself never referred to it as such, it is still sometimes incorrectly referred to as a “ragtime opera”. The music of Treemonisha includes an overture and prelude, along with various recitatives, choruses, small ensemble pieces, a ballet, and a few arias.

Overture from Treemonisha:

Prelude from Treemonisha:

Joplin and his fellow ragtime composers rejuvenated American popular music, fostering an appreciation for African American music among European Americans by creating exhilarating and liberating dance tunes, changing American musical taste. “Its syncopation and rhythmic drive gave it a vitality and freshness attractive to young urban audiences indifferent to Victorian proprieties… Joplin’s ragtime expressed the intensity and energy of a modern urban America.

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