Scott Joplin popularizes ragtime music with his…

1899 CE

Scott Joplin popularizes ragtime music with his Maple Leaf Rag.

In the late 1880s, having performed at various local events as a teenager, Joplin had chosen to give up work as a laborer with the railroad and left his native Texarkana to become a traveling musician.

Little is known about his movements at this time, although he is recorded in Texarkana in July 1891 as a member of the Texarkana Minstrels in a performance that happened to be raising money for a monument to Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy.

He soon discovered, however, that there were few opportunities for black pianists.

Churches and brothels were among the few options for steady work. Joplin played pre-ragtime 'jig-piano' in various red-light districts throughout the mid-South, and some claim he was in Sedalia and St. Louis in Missouri during this time.

In 1893 Joplin was in Chicago for the World's Fair.

While in Chicago, he formed his first band playing cornet and began arranging music for the group to perform.

Although the World's Fair minimized the involvement of African-Americans, black performers still came to the saloons, cafés and brothels that lined the fair.

The exposition was attended by twenty-seven million Americans and had a profound effect on many areas of American cultural life, including ragtime.

Although specific information is sparse, numerous sources have credited the Chicago World Fair with spreading the popularity of ragtime.

Joplin found that his music, as well as that of other black performers, was popular with visitors.

By 1897 ragtime had become a national craze in U.S. cities, and was described by the St. Louis Dispatch as "a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city bred people."

Joplin had arrived in Sedalia, Missouri in 1894.

At first, Joplin stayed with the family of Arthur Marshall, at the time a thirteen-year-old boy but later one of Joplin's students and a rag-time composer in his own right.

There is no record of Joplin having a permanent residence in the town until 1904, as Joplin was making a living as a touring musician.

There is little precise evidence known about Joplin's activities at this time, although he performed as a solo musician at dances and at the major black clubs in Sedalia, the Black 400 club and the Maple Leaf Club.

He performed in the Queen City Cornet Band, and his own six-piece dance orchestra. A tour with his own singing group, the Texas Medley Quartet, gave him his first opportunity to publish his own compositions and it is known that he went to Syracuse, New York and Texas.

Two businessmen from New York published Joplin's first two works, the songs "Please Say You Will", and "A Picture of her Face" in 1895.

Joplin's visit to Temple, Texas, enabled him to have three pieces published there in 1896, including the "Great Crush Collision March", which commemorated a planned train crash on the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad on September 15 that he may have witnessed.

While in Sedalia he is teaching piano to students who include future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Brun Campbell, and Scott Hayden

In turn, Joplin enrolls at the George R. Smith College, where he apparently studied "...advanced harmony and composition."

The College records will be destroyed in a fire in 1925, and biographer Edward A. Berlin notes that it was unlikely that a small college for African-Americans would be able to provide such a course.

In 1899, Joplin marries Belle, the sister-in-law of collaborator Scott Hayden.

Although there are hundreds of rags in print by the time the "Maple Leaf Rag" is published, Joplin is not far behind.

His first published rag, "Original Rags", had been completed in 1897, the same year as the first ragtime work in print, the "Mississippi Rag" by William Krell.

The "Maple Leaf Rag" is likely to have been known in Sedalia before its publication in 1899; Brun Campbell will claim to have seen the manuscript of the work in around 1898.

The exact circumstances that led to the Maple Leaf Rag's publication are unknown, and a number of versions of the event contradict each other.

After several unsuccessful approaches to publishers, Joplin signs a contract on August 10, 1899 with John Stillwell Stark, a retailer of musical instruments who will later become his most important publisher.

The contract stipulates that Joplin will receive a 1% royalty on all sales of the rag, with a minimum sales price of 25 cents.

With the inscription "To the Maple Leaf Club" prominently visible along the top of at least some editions, it is likely that the rag was named after the Maple Leaf Club, although there is no direct evidence to prove the link, and there are many other possible sources for the name in and around Sedalia at the time.

There will be many claims about the sales of the "Maple Leaf Rag", for example that Joplin was the first musician to sell one million copies of a piece of instrumental music.

Joplin's first biographer, Rudi Blesh, will write that during its first six months the piece sold 75,000 copies, and became "...the first great instrumental sheet music hit in America."

However, research by Joplin's later biographer Edward A. Berlin demonstrated that this was not the case; the initial print-run of four hundred took one year to sell, and under the terms of Joplin's contract with a 1% royalty would have given Joplin an income of $4 (or approximately $120 at current prices)

Later sales will be steady, and will give Joplin an income that covers his expenses.

In 1909, estimated sales will give him an income of $600 annually (approximately $16,731 in current prices).

The "Maple Leaf Rag" does serve as a model for the hundreds of rags to come from future composers, especially in the development of classic ragtime.

After the publication of the "Maple Leaf Rag", Joplin is soon being described as "King of rag time writers", not least by himself on the covers of his own work, such as "The Easy Winners" and "Elite Syncopations".