In New York, 1913, there were plenty of wealthy black people who moved to Harlem and bought a house there. Oddly enough, among them, there was a musician: the pianist Scott Joplin, composer of ragtimes and author of two operas. He was born in 1867, a good time to be born if you were black because two years before Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves. That was the good news because one year after the executive order, the Ku-Klux-Klan was born.
Turned into a pianist thanks to his formidable talent and the free lessons from a German teacher, Joplin decided to follow in the footsteps of Johannes Brahms and Isaac Albéniz, and at age 20 he began to make a living playing the piano in bars and taverns, as a travelling pianist through Mississippi Valley, visiting cities that usually maintained an enviable inter-racial co-existence, to the point that there is no public record of lynchings, at least in the 1890s.
Soon Joplin began to compose his own pieces, brief, syncopated, with a "ragged" rhythm (a ragged time), in the style of the popular ragtime, which although already predominating in black music, was Joplin who took it to a higher stage. His more successful composition, Maple Leaf Rag, of 1897, got to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in the USA. According to some, Joplin received a percentage that allowed him later to buy a beautiful house in St. Louis. According to others, the money earned did not exceed 600 dollars per year, for a short period.
The Sting
Perhaps today we would not remember Scott Joplin were it not for the movie The Sting, 1973, which included as part of its soundtrack the piano piece The Entertainer, composed in 1901. The film gave rise to a renewed interest in his music; in 1974, a New York Times columnist claimed: "Hey musicologists, it's time to pay attention to Joplin" ... Nothing would have made Joplin happier than an invocation like that because from the beginning he claimed for ragtime a status similar to that of the "serious" music coming from Europe. Joplin was right. A musicologist from our days clearly maintains that ragtime is "the exact equivalent, in terms of local style, of Mozart's minuets, Chopin's mazurkas or Strauss waltzes".
Maple Leaf Rag
Scott Joplin died in New York, in 1917, closer to poverty than to abundance, notwithstanding the house in Harlem.
The rendition, allegedly, is from Joplin himself: a piano roll found by chance.
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