Born in Texas in 1868, Scott Joplin was one of the originators of the new Ragtime music and certainly the best-known of such composers. Like many accomplished musicians, he started early learning the piano from age 7, and was taken onboard by a music teacher who helped to broaden his musical education. Joplin left home while still a teenager and worked as a pianist in the Southern States learning many of his skills on the job. The areas he worked in were the cradle of music where cultures met and mixed, and musical styles combined and expanded.
Joplin then settled in St. Louis for a number of years, playing the cornet in a band and forming his own vocal group with his brothers for which he started writing songs. He also met Arthur Marshall (with whom he was later to co-write the Swipesy Cakewalk), stayed with his family for a time, and the pair attended higher musical education classes. Like many other ragtime composers, his main trade was playing piano in honky-tonk bars and clubs.
It was in 1898 that Joplin sold his first rag called "Original Rags" and soon afterwards he found a publisher, John Stark, for his The Maple Leaf Rag. This was the real turning point in his career, becoming an instant hit, and enabling Joplin to sell much more in this new medium which had suddenly left the seedy bars and become respectable. Joplin then went on to write a large number of piano rags over the next few years.
Joplin had further ambitions beyond simple piano rags, but it is fair to say that these forays had limited success. He wrote some folk ballet music, and a couple of ragtime operas. He published his second opera "Treemonisha" at his own expense, but it wasn't turned into a successful performance. Quite naturally, it seems that Joplin was disillusioned by this failure and that perhaps dampened his confidence when it came to other musical ventures. He has left a substantial legacy of ragtime music, and it was his music including The Entertainer, Solace and The Easy Winners as used by Marvin Hamlisch in the movie The Sting which instigated a strong revival of interest in ragtime music later in the 20th century. Joplin's rags were also used in the sequel "The Sting 2" adapted by Lalo Schifrin and also in the movie "Pretty Baby" which included Swipesy and several other rags. There was also a film about Joplin himself with the lead role played by Billy Dee Williams.
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Joplin himself lived before sound recording technology was commonplace, but he did make a number of "piano rolls" playing his own works. These can be played on players (looking like upright pianos) which read the rolls and trigger the playing of notes according to the position of the holes in the roll recorded by the original player, in this case Scott Joplin himself. While these instruments maybe lack a little in terms of dynamic range, recordings of them provide a fascinating insight into the original composer and his approach to playing his own works. He often provided tempo markings for his rags such as "slow" - he treated such works very much as a serious art-form, whereas some pianists had a tendency to play this kind of music fast for comic effect. A number of CDs feature recordings of Joplin's piano rolls such as this one available from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com. There are of course many other recordings of Joplin's rags played by other pianists (or indeed the Soundtrack of the Sting) to listen to, but if you play piano it's worth investing in a sheet music book with a comprehensive selection of piano rags to play yourself, such as the following ones:
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