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About Scott Joplin
Hometown
Marshall, TX, United States
Born
1868
Genre
Jazz
Known as the “King of Ragtime,” Scott Joplin pioneered the syncopated piano music that was indispensable to the development of jazz. Born circa 1868 in Texas, Joplin grew up in the town of Texarkana, on the Texas–Arkansas border. He taught himself to play piano and learned about European art music, including opera, from Julius Weiss. By the early 1890s, Joplin had become a traveling musician. But it wasn’t until after settling in Sedalia, Missouri, where he studied at the George R. Smith College, that he wrote the piano rags for which he’s celebrated today. "Original Rags" was his first to appear in print, in 1898; it was soon followed by the two most famous rags of all time, "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899), which sold about half a million copies by 1909, and "The Entertainer" (1902), which was used as the theme for the 1973 movie The Sting. Joplin’s opera Treemonisha was premiered in 1972, long after his death in 1917. It’s an allegory of Black liberation in the post-Reconstruction South, advocating for education as a way out of systemic oppression, and an important contribution from a composer whose career shaped the course of music in America.
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