Scott Joplin: Texarkana’s Ragtime King

Today is the birthday of Scott Joplin. He would be 158 today.

Scott Joplin was born around November 24, 1868, near Texarkana, Texas — the border city that straddles the line between Texas and Arkansas. His father was a former slave who played violin. His mother played banjo and sang. A local German-born music teacher named Julius Weiss recognized something unusual in the boy and gave him free piano lessons. That investment changed American music. Joplin absorbed European classical forms and the syncopated rhythms he heard in the Black community, and began to build something from both.

The King of Ragtime

“Maple Leaf Rag,” published by John Stark in Sedalia, Missouri in 1899, was the first piece of sheet music to sell one million copies. It made Joplin famous and earned him a royalty for life. He followed it with dozens more rags — “The Entertainer,” “Elite Syncopations,” “The Cascades” — each one a small, perfect engine of syncopated rhythm and countermelody. Joplin spent his later years on Treemonisha, a full-length opera, which he could not get produced or funded in his lifetime. He died April 1, 1917, in New York, broke and ill. In 1976, he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Music. Texarkana gave the world its ragtime king. Learn more at the Texas State Historical Association.