Scott Joplin was born in 1868 or thereabouts. Probably in Texarkana, probably on the Arkansas side. His father was a railway worker and for a while he was one also, though eventually he was able to begin making a career he preferred as a music teacher. Then he became a performer and a composer of songs in the form that we know as ragtime. When Joplin published “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899 he grew relatively wealthy and was recognized as the greatest exponent of ragtime music. However, the popularity of ragtime began to wane and Joplin’s career tailed off. He died of syphilis in 1916, in a New York hospital, and was soon completely forgotten.
So things remained for half a century. But then, in 1970, a classical pianist named Joshua Rifkin released a record called Scott Joplin Piano Rags on the Nonesuch album label. Nonesuch was a classical label, which is fitting because Joplin thought of ragtime as a kind of classical music. Rifkin’s record was unexpectedly popular, ultimately becoming the first million selling record on Nonesuch, and it reintroduced Joplin’s music to the American public. This recovery was greatly aided by the appearance of one of Joplin’s rags, “The Entertainer,” in Marvin Hamlisch’s score for the movie The Sting. (An anachronistic choice, since the movie was set in the 1930s.) It was soon discovered that Joplin had written a great deal of music, including two operas, one of which was performed in his lifetime but was later lost. (The manuscript was confiscated after Joplin had become ill and unable to pay his debts.) The other one – a story about the importance of education in the Black community – survived, and was structurally and melodically complete, but had never been scored. Gunther Schuller orchestrated this opera, called Treemonisha, and had it performed in 1978. The resurrection of Scott Joplin as a major American composer would thus seem to be complete.
