This month we are learning about American composer Scott Joplin and ragtime music, the first American style of music. During our lesson time we will be talking a little about Scott Joplin’s life and the time of great changes in America during which he lived. I will be asking all my students to complete two homework assignments:

1. Illustrate a cover sheet for their favorite piano piece (it can be from the lesson book, performance book, a piece I taught them, or one of their own compositions). Ragtime sheet music was sold in booklet form with beautiful illustrations on the cover page. They can think about the illustration as the cover of a storybook. Encourage them to think about the title of the piece and the mood of the music (happy, sad, etc.)… they can even create a story around it. The idea is to have fun with it!
2. Color and fill out the Scott Joplin coloring page they will receive this week while listening to some of his compositions.

SUGGESTED VIDEOS FOR LISTENING HOMEWORK:

The Entertainer

Magnetic Rag

Maple Leaf Rag

 

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF Scott joplin:

Known as the King of Ragtime, Scott Joplin epitomized the melding of the classical music of Europe with the folk music of the African Americans. He was born shortly after the end of the Civil War to a former slave and a maid. Brought up in a very poor area of Texarkana, TX, his mother, Florence, did everything she could to feed his love of the piano (against his father’s wishes).  While she cleaned houses, Scott would practice on the pianos of the homeowners.

He was greatly influenced by the patriotic marches of composer and band leader John Philip Sousa, old African dances such as struts and hops that his father had played on the fiddle, and church shouts.

When he was twenty years old, he left home to pursue a career in music. He worked as a piano player on the smaller riverboats that traveled up and down the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to St. Louis. Around 1890 he spent some time in St. Louis, Missouri playing at the local saloons where the riverboat men gambled. He played the lively “dancin’ music” known as ragtime and quickly established himself as the finest ragtime player in St. Louis. His fame spread across the Midwest, leading him to job after job. But the life of a wandering musician was not what Joplin desired. He wished above all else to compose and elevate ragtime to the status of classical music.

Up until that point, ragtime players would simply sit down at the piano and start to play. There was no sheet music to read from, in fact, most people believed that the syncopated “ragged” music could not be written down. To further complicate things, publishers did not believe that there was a market for ragtime music, because most people considered any music that came out of the slave tradition to be insignificant.

For an African American man in post-Civil war America, getting published and performing his music in a concert hall were virtually impossible. But sometimes it only takes one person to believe in an artist and history is made. This is what happened when Scott Joplin met Otis Sanders, who became Scott’s unofficial manager. Otis helped Scott become the resident pianist of the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia in 1898. With a steady paycheck, Scott could now focus on composing and soon after published his first composition “Original Rags”. It was soon followed by many other compositions such as “Sunflower Slow Drag”, “Maple Leaf Rag” (his favorite), “Swipesy Cakewalk”, “Augustan Club Waltz”, “Peacherine Rag”, and “The Entertainer” (his most successful piece) all published by John Stark.

Ragtime by now was sweeping the nation and was even being played in the drawing rooms of Paris. It was also evolving, becoming faster and less reliant on the old African rhythms that Scott had built his compositions around. In 1907, Scott Joplin moved to New York City after the end of his marriage to Belle Hayden and the 1904 death of his second wife, Freddie Alexander, after two months of marriage. There he met and married Lottie Stokes. In New York he set out to fulfill his dream of composing the first ragtime opera. This project was so near and dear to his heart that he not only composed the music but wrote the story, composed the orchestra parts, and choreographed the dances. This opera was to show African Americans that “with strength, education, and perseverance, (they) could overcome the sad effects of slavery.”(1)

He fought very hard to have his opera, Treemonisha, performed but due to a series of unfortunate events and the lack of interest in the general public in seeing a show about slavery, its 1915 performance was not a success despite its winning musical qualities. Around this time, ragtime was reaching the end of its popularity… jazz was on the rise.

Scott Joplin died on April 1, 1917 at age 49 and was buried in an unmarked grave on Long Island. His musical genius, unfortunately, was only fully appreciated long after his death. His music set off a new ragtime craze when, in 1973, “The Entertainer” was chosen as the theme song for the Academy award winning movie The Sting. In 1975 his ragtime opera Treemonisha was performed at the Houston Grand Opera to rave reviews and later that year opened on Broadway.

 

For more information on the life of Scott Joplin:

(1) Barbara Mitchell, “Raggin’ – A Story about Scott Joplin”, Carolrhoda Books, 1987.

(2) Peter Gammon, “Scott Joplin and the Ragtime Era,” St. Martin’s Press, 1975.

 

Children’s books about Scott Joplin:

• Treemonisha by Angela Shelf Medearis
• Raggin’ – A Story about Scott Joplin by Barbara Mitchell