By Stephanie Perez, Advertising Manager & Staff Writer
Recognized for his most famous pieces “The Entertainer” and “The Maple Leaf Rag,” Scott Joplin was known as the “King of Ragtime” at the turn of the 20th century. Composer and pianist, his fame was achieved through his compositions of rag music that was born out of the African-American community.
Born in the late 1860s Joplin spent his childhood in northeastern Texas. By 1880, his family moved to Texarkana where he studied piano with his local teachers growing up and started traveling as a musician in his teens. One of the first documented signs of Joplin’s musical career began in the mid-1880s when he performed at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He then settled in Sedalia, Mo., where he played his first cornet in the Queen City Cornet Band — a local ensemble of black musicians.
Joplin studied music at Sedalia’s George R. Smith for Negroes during the 1890s and then later worked as a teacher and a mentor for other ragtime musicians. His first published piano rag during the 1890s, “Original Rags,” shared credit with another arranger.
Joplin’s reputation rests on his classic rags compositions for piano, including “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer,” that were published from 1899 through 1909. He is remembered as someone who developed the ragtime music to a grand extent and made a standard for ragtime compositions. He will forever be known as the king of ragtime.