In the course of Scott Joplin’s life, America progressed
through post-civil war reconstruction, economic depression, and recovery with
the surging growth of industry, urban life and electrified cities. It was a
period when African American’s sought to utilize the new opportunities of
emancipation, and debate was hot as to how to overcome the ‘Jim Crow’ system
that had replaced slavery. As the undoubted king of rag time, a style which, as
a prelude to Jazz and Blues, is perhaps the first real American grown genre of
music to spread across the nation, Scott Joplin has earned the deserved
reputation as a decisive and brilliant composer. His life, and indeed his work,
is an example of an American dream of progress, education, freedom and
emancipation; even if it was, at times, illusionary.
Born in Texas C.1867,
two years after the end of the civil war, Joplin entered a world that was still
finding itself between visions of progress and fears of white backlash. The
abolition of slavery may have marked the beginning of Jim Crow and,
consequently, the birth of the civil rights movement, yet emancipation also brought
new opportunity. As C. Vann Woodward has argued, the reconstruction era Joplin
was born into was not as racially polarized as the rigid Jim Crow system that
would rear its head at the turn of the century. Indeed, the Joplin family found
a breath of civilization when they moved to the new railroad town of Texarkana,
when Scott was still young. There he was able to get a basic education and
showed himself to be a natural on many communally held instruments; in
particular he expressed a love and flair for the piano. Despite her poor
wages, his mother was able to purchase a piano for Scott before he was ten as well as attaining lessons for her son from one of her employers. Within the close
knit Texarkana community word of Scott’s potential spread and allowed him to
cross the ‘colour line’ with relative ease and support, receiving lessons
from local white composers and teachers. The exact identity of Joplin’s music
teacher(s) and their influence is still unknown; nonetheless it is significant
that, by his mid-teens, Scott could not only read and write, but also read,
play and compose music.
“Ragtime”, the style synonymous with Joplin, derives its
name from the genre’s use of syncopation and consequent “ragged” feel of timing.
With his education and talent supporting him, Scott cut his teeth and dived
into ragtime as an ‘itinerant’ musician travelling the American south and
mid-west. Like Leadbelly’s experiences in ‘fannin’ street in the 1910s, the
patrons of itinerant musicians in the 1880s were brothels, saloons, parlors,
and other ‘red light’ areas. While most were solo gigs, there were competitions
among players, famously at the Silver
Dollar bar in St Louis, and there was also the chance to interact and recruit
other travelling musicians and create a larger act for the road.
Through his travels, Joplin was able to escape the rural
south and made it to Chicago. His biographers are unanimous in noting the
importance of Joplin’s presence at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in the
city (A.K.A. the Chicago World’s fair). It is still disputed whether Joplin played
in the fair’s program, though he certainly played in the local bars and hotels
that supported the influx of visitors to the city. The meaning and significance
of the fair for Joplin is still contested. The ‘city of lights’, so called as
it was the first attraction to ever make large scale use of Edison’s light bulb,
was a monumental attraction that boasted of modernism and American progression.
As an event, the fair showcased numerous musical talents, including ragtime
artists, to huge crowds of visitors from across America and the world which
showed an obvious potential for growth and distribution of the genre. It is
noted that after the fair Joplin began to realise his potential as a composer
as well as an entertainer, which his biographers attribute to his experience in
Chicago. Indeed the fair’s emphasis on progress and science resonates with the
complex, almost scientific, sound of many of Joplin’s rags. However, the fair’s
significance for African Americans was a negative one. The fair had displays
that were degrading to African Americans and were subsequently criticized by W.E.B. Du Bois. Joplin’s exact stance towards the fair is unknown,
though his biographers have speculated that the disparity between its vision of
progress and the negative portrayal of race created a challenge that the
performer sought to overcome with his talents.
With this new role as a composer in mind, Joplin first
settled in St Louis where he published his infamous Mapple Leaf Rag with the music publisher and store owner John
Stark. His compositions earned him a good living and he migrated to New York at
the turn of the Century to continue his work. The industry of the city allowed
his work to be disseminated across the country through the output of the
printing presses. Of course music has been printed since the Renaissance, but
never before had it achieved such an industrial output. The companies that
bought Joplin’s works were often vertically integrated, with owners, like
Stark, controlling factories where a range of Pianos, diverging in quality,
were constructed; publishing houses where music was printed; and stores where both
goods were sold. Such companies marketed their pianos, and Joplin’s rags, to
bourgeois households, particularly targeting the appeal of the instrument to
housewives, playing on their domestic role of entertaining the family and
guests.Through such a medium, Joplin’s music was disseminated and became popular across America’s households.
For the last fifteen years of his life, Joplin struggled to
produce his magnum opus: an opera entitled Treemonisha.
The opera’s composition and production was fraught with setbacks. While still
composing shorter pieces, and working in the red light scene to support himself,
the opera’s only production during Joplin’s lifetime was met with mixed
reviews, as the composer could not maintain an orchestra and was forced to play
the score as a solo piano part. But the publication of the score received
excellent appraisals from New York’s critics, to Joplin’s delight. As he worked
to adapt the score for another production, he was hospitalized having contracted
Syphilis, which he died of 1 April 1917. Although ragtime survived underground
for decades, Joplin’s music had a popular renaissance in the 1970s, in part
aided by its rediscovery by classical artists, as well as the popular appeal of
the film The Sting, which featured several of Joplin’s most
famous compositions. Treemonisha also,
finally, got the full production it deserved in 1972.
Many of Scott Joplin’s biographers have tried to situate him
between the opinions of W.E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; the two major
leaders of the African American community in the late 19th and early
20th Centuries. With almost no surviving sources of Joplin’s
personal life, it is hard to fathom his precise views on the issue of racism
and prejudice. Though Du Bois and Washington disagreed about the speed and
manner with which African American’s should attain the equality they deserved,
it was axiomatic to both that education and cultural development would be a key
factor in achieving that freedom (respectively through the Talented Tenth and
the Tuskegee institute). From the libretto and composition of Treemonisha, it
is clear that Joplin sought to propagate this view, namely, that the road to
progress and greater freedom lies in opportunities of education and learning,
of which Joplin himself was a prime example. Indeed, it is a timeless maxim
applicable to all.
***
For my part, Solace, a
Mexican Serenade, remains one of my favourite compositions. Though, as the
first song that I ever ‘multitracked’, I have done it little justice.
Nonetheless the second half of the song has a carefree feel that is sublime and
a joy to play. Joplin’s waltz, Bethena,
is perhaps the sweetest in the genre. I also couldn’t resist recording The entertainer. Although it is
overplayed, it is also his most famous work.
