In 1895 Joplin placed two songs, “Please Say You Will” and “A Picture of Her Face,” with publishers in Syracuse, New York, while on a tour with the Medley Quartette. When Joplin came to Sedalia, he became friends with many of these individuals, joined their Queen City Concert Band, and performed in clubs of which they were the proprietors.įor the first couple of years in Sedalia, Joplin and Saunders divided their time between playing regular engagements in town and taking their acts on the road. Henderson enjoyed communitywide prominence as professionals, property owners, or entertainers, and they formed the core of leadership within the black community. Carter, Dailey Steele, Tony Williams, and R.
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While many African Americans worked in jobs that required manual labor, men such as G. By the 1890s the bustling town offered a wide range of employment opportunities, from common labor in the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad shops to service-oriented positions in the downtown hotels, saloons, barbershops, and restaurants. As an important railhead, Sedalia had attracted a large number of workers, businessmen, and entertainers-both black and white-in the decades since its founding just before the Civil War. In 1894 Joplin and Saunders arrived in Sedalia, Missouri, where both found work in various downtown businesses. In the years following the World’s Fair, Joplin found increasing numbers of opportunities to perform his music for white as well as black audiences. Nevertheless, Joplin and other African American musicians found that visitors to the fair clamored to hear their music. The Columbian Exposition was not particularly congenial to African Americans, as it featured few exhibits pertaining to black life and culture: official literature offered insulting stereotypical depictions of African Americans, and none of the US commissioners, committee members, guides, or guards were black. At the fair he met Otis Saunders, with whom he traveled for a time and who eventually brought him to Missouri. While in Chicago, Joplin formed his first band, which consisted of a cornet, a clarinet, a tuba, and a baritone horn, and began arranging music for the group to perform. Although he did not perform as part of the official program of the fair, Joplin, like other black entertainers, found work in the cafés that lined the Midway Plaisance-the entertainment center of the fair-as well as the city’s tenderloin district.
In 1893 Joplin made his way to Chicago to perform for the throngs who visited the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. Like many African American entertainers in the Mississippi valley in this period, Joplin improvised music that combined elements of the Western musical tradition-adopting such forms as the waltz, the schottische, and the march-with melodies and rhythms derived from African American musical culture. After refusing to give up piano playing for more steady employment as a railroad laborer, he left Texarkana sometime in the 1880s and supported himself as an itinerant musician. His parents, both of whom were talented musicians, encouraged the boy, and eventually the family acquired a used square piano for his use.Īs a teenager, Joplin began performing at various local events.
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While in Texarkana, the younger Joplin learned how to play piano, partly through his own efforts on an instrument owned by one of his mother’s employers and partly through lessons from a German music teacher, Julius Weiss.
During his early childhood, the Joplin family lived on a plantation owned by William Caves, but in the 1870s they moved to the recently founded town of Texarkana, where Jiles Joplin began working for the railroad.
Joplin was born on November 24, 1868, in Cass County, Texas, the second son of Jiles and Florence Joplin. He wrote two operas, one ragtime ballet, and forty-four original pieces, seven of which were in collaboration with other composers. Known during his lifetime as the “King of Ragtime Writers,” Scott Joplin was an African American musician and the foremost contributor to a “Missouri style” of ragtime music in the 1890s and early 1900s.
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