Before Louis Armstrong, before Elvis Presley, there was Scott Joplin.
Joplin was born on the Texas side of Texarkana in 1868 to a free mother and an ex-slave father. The father and mother played, respectively, fiddle and banjo in a dance band. His siblings sang and played guitar. It was a typical American musical family, except that it was black.
Scott learned to play guitar and bugle, but it was at age seven that he discovered a piano in a neighbor’s house and proved himself a prodigy. Pretty soon everyone in Texarkana, no matter what race, heard about the black boy and his piano technique. Every city in those days had a German immigrant who was a music teacher. Just as Stephen Foster learned from a local German music teacher, so did little Scott. The Germans weren’t so picky about the color line in the South.
One piece that had an influence on young Scott was the finale of Beethoven’s last piano sonata. There is a variation with a five-notes-to-one-beat pulse that uses a 12/32 time signature and syncopates the melodic line. Here Beethoven invents jazz. Skip ahead to 6:31 in this video to see what I mean. Catch that boogie-woogie left hand at 7:44.
Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111 (Part 1 of Finale)
In 1882, at age 14, Joplin left home and plunged into the world of entertainment, a universe of honky-tonks, saloons, pool halls and – ahem! – “sporting houses” where gifted pianists were in demand. This world was one of the few places where white and black could meet as equals.
Joplin roamed all over the Mississippi Valley, picking up a lot of new musical styles, but the one that united this new world of music was ragtime, known in its early days as “jig piano” or “whorehouse music”. Its rule was simple: Keep the left hand playing in a straight 2/4 with a one-and-two-and beat, and let the right hand syncopate the melody raggedly and work around the prison of the bar lines, which is how the music got its name.
In the musical era of post-Civil War sentimental songs, ragtime was a refreshing change, but it was a change that polite society tried to ignore at first. There is a wonderful scene in John Wayne’s last film, “The Shootist”, set in 1901, where Ron Howard whistles a few bars of Joplin, and his mother, played by Lauren Bacall, shushes him for whistling such a naughty thing on Sunday!
Joplin arrived in St. Louis in 1885 at age 17 and took up his base of operations at Turpin’s Silver Dollar Saloon, a hotbed of vice in the black community and home of the new ragtime sound. Every so often, a madam at one of the sporting houses would ask for a piano player, and Scott or someone else would be hired on the spot. He might be paid in cash – or in trade, which was to have a devastating effect on Joplin in his Forties. He ranged over much of Missouri and went to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair where he formed a dance band. Following Chicago, he settled in Sedalia (MO) where he became a part of the black middle class. He formed a barbershop octet in Sedalia, wrote songs for them and toured the Midwest and even the Northeast in 1895, at age 27.
In 1896, the little town of Temple (TX) saw a freight train collision on the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway. Joplin memorialized the event in a piece that shows the roots of ragtime. He places written descriptions along the stave in the score, and the piece just begs to be syncopated.
Joplin: ”The Great Crush Collision March”
Another piece from this early period also received publication. There is a bit of syncopation here.
Waltzes were as much a part of American parlor piano music as marches.
Joplin did succeed in getting one ragtime piece published. There is a strong hint here of what was to come.