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Scott Joplin (born between June 1867 – January 1868; died April 1, 1917) 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.
Scott Joplin, the second of six children, was born in East Texas, near Linden, to Florence Givins and Giles or Jiles Joplin. For many years, his birthdate was thought to be November 24, 1868; but research by ragtime historian Ed Berlin has revealed this as inaccurate.
After 1871, the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Texas, and Scott's mother cleaned homes so Scott could have a place to practice his music. By 1882 his mother had purchased a piano. Showing musical ability at an early age, the young Joplin received free piano lessons from a German music teacher, Julius Weiss, who gave him a well rounded knowledge of classical music form, which would serve him well in later years and fuel his ambition to create a "classical" form of ragtime. At the 1893 World's Fair, in Chicago, Illinois, he heard the latest music, including the concert band of John Phillip Sousa, who played there daily. He would later further his musical education by attending George R. Smith College in Sedalia, Missouri, studying music theory, harmony, and composition.
By the late 1880s, Scott Joplin had left home to start a life of his own. He may have joined or formed various quartets and other musical groups and traveled around the Midwest to sing. In the Queen City Concert Band, he played second cornet. After organizing The Texas Medley Quartette, he helped them to sing their way to, and back from, Syracuse, New York. He was part of a minstrel troupe in Texarkana about 1891. In 1895, Joplin was in Syracuse, selling two songs, "Please Say You Will" and "A Picture of Her Face".
Despite all his traveling, Joplin's home was in Sedalia, to which he moved in 1894, working as a pianist in the Maple Leaf and the Black 400, social clubs for "respectable gentlemen".
By 1898 Joplin had sold six pieces for the piano. Of the six, only "Original Rags", a compilation of existing melodies that he wrote collaboratively, is a ragtime piece. The other five were "Please Say You Will", "A Picture of Her Face", two marches, and a waltz.
In 1899, Joplin sold what would become his most famous piece, "Maple Leaf Rag" to John Stark & Son, a Sedalia music publisher. Joplin received a one-cent royalty for each copy and ten free copies for his own use, as well as an advance. It has been estimated that Joplin made $360 per year on this piece in his lifetime.
"Maple Leaf Rag" boosted Joplin to the top of the list of ragtime performers and moved ragtime into prominence as a musical form.
With a growing national reputation based on the success of "Maple Leaf Rag", Joplin moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in early 1900 with his new wife, Belle. While living there, in 1900–1903, he produced some of his best-known works, including "The Entertainer", "Elite Syncopations", "March Majestic", and "Ragtime Dance".
Joplin married several times. Perhaps his dearest love, Freddie Alexander died at age twenty, of complications resulting from a cold, two months after their wedding. Joplin's first work copyrighted after Freddie's death, "Bethena" (1905), is a very sad, musically complex ragtime waltz.
After months of faltering, Joplin continued writing and publishing. He was a best-selling composer of sheet music. With much hard work, he produced the award-winning opera Treemonisha. The score to an earlier ragtime opera by Joplin, A Guest of Honor, is lost.
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