Scott Joplin

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. You may have heard that
this year, which is twenty twenty three, is being marked

(00:22):
as the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop. There's been a
musical tribute at the Grammy Awards, and new museum installations
and concerts, new films and documentaries, a whole lot of stuff,
and over the course of the year, a lot of
shows that are part of the iHeart podcast network are
also recognizing this anniversary in some way. For our part,

(00:43):
we wanted to go back a little bit further in
history to a musical genre that has some parallels with
hip hop music and also influenced some of the musical
styles that became part of hip hop's origins, like jazz
and blues. That musical is ragtime, specifically Scott Joplin, who

(01:03):
is sometimes called the King of ragtime writers, who has
been on my shortlist for an episode for many years.
At this point, long stretches of Scott Joplin's life are
unfortunately not very well documented. He was born during the
post Civil War reconstruction era, when records of births and
deaths could be pretty spotty, especially for black people. A

(01:27):
lot of widely repeated basics came from recollections that other
people gave much later, in particular his third wife, Lottie
Stokes Joplin. Some widely repeated details about his life came
from interviews she did in the nineteen forties that was
more than twenty years after Joplin's death. Sometimes people describe
Lottie as giving incorrect information, but it's also possible that

(01:50):
she told interviewers exactly what Scott had told her while
he was still alive. Like a lot of people, at
various points in his life, he fudged his age or
his birth year, and some of those alternate years made
it into print. There are also some details that he
may have just been mistaken about, like a lot of
sources give his place of birth as Texarkana, Texas, which

(02:13):
is where he did live from a very young age,
so he may have just incorrectly thought that he had
also been born there. Joplin also died of tertiary syphilis,
which affects a person's body and their mind, and while
the symptoms of this illness seem to have become really
noticeable about eighteen months before his death. It's also possible

(02:34):
that he was experiencing some cognitive symptoms for most of
his relationship with Lottie. A lot of sources, including his
grave marker, give Scott Joplin's date of birth as November
twenty fourth, eighteen sixty eight, but he was probably born
at least a few months before that. Census records from
July of eighteen seventy list his age as two years old.

(02:56):
His place of birth is also not really known, but
based on what we know about his family, it was
probably somewhere in northeastern Texas. Scott Joplin's parents were Giles
and Florence Joplin, who worked as sharecroppers, and he was
their second son. Giles had been enslaved from birth in
North Carolina and Florence had been born to a free

(03:19):
black family in Kentucky. They both eventually made their way
to Texas, and they had at least four more children
after Scott was born. A lot of sources mentioned how
musical the Joplin family was, but this wouldn't necessarily have
been unusual. Music was one of the main ways people
kept themselves entertained, so a lot of people knew how

(03:40):
to sing and to play at least one instrument. Music
was also one of the ways that black people could
earn a living outside of things like sharecropping and manual labor.
Florence Joplin played the banjo and Giles played the violin,
and two of Scott's brothers, William and Robert, also went
on to be professional musicians. Music that Scott and the

(04:01):
rest of his family would have been exposed to from
a very early age would have included a lot of
different types. There would have been African, Caribbean and European
musical influences, including working songs, religious songs and spirituals, and
ring shouts, which had roots in religious practices from Central
and Western Africa. During this era, it was also extremely

(04:23):
common for black entertainers to play for mostly white audiences,
whether it was on stage or in people's homes, and
that meant a lot of black musicians were also very
familiar with the types of music that white people tended
to like, including waltzes and marches. Sometime around eighteen seventy five,
the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Texas that sits on

(04:46):
the border between Texas and Arkansas. This town had been
established at the end of eighteen seventy three as the
Texas and Pacific Railroad planned a connection with the Cairo
and Fulton Railroad, which ran through Arkansas. Florence job got
a job as a domestic worker, and Scott started learning
to play the piano on one that belonged to one
of her employers. Florence recognized that Scott had some musical talent,

(05:10):
and she seems to have actively looked for opportunities for
him to study music. While living in tech Sarcana, he
worked with a teacher who had emigrated from Germany, and
sources generally agree that this was Julius Weiss, who had
emigrated to the US in eighteen seventy. We don't really
have any detail about what their lessons were like, but

(05:30):
Weiss was lodging with Colonel RW. Rogers and teaching Rogers children,
so it's possible that he taught Scott the same academic
subjects that he was teaching to those kids. But at
some point the Joplin family also bought a used piano,
and there's some speculation that they bought it from Rogers
after he bought his family a new one. A lot

(05:51):
of researchers conclude that Weiss taught Joplin the basics of
various European musical traditions, including European opera, and it's clear
that Weiss had a big influence on Joplin. Joplin talked
about sending him money later in life when he heard
that he was sick and not doing well financially. But
also in eighteen eighty nine, newspapers reported that a Professor J. Weiss,

(06:15):
who had until lately been the president and manager of
the Texarcanas Savings Bank, had vanished along with thirty seven
thousand dollars in bank funds. Yeah, he's just sort of
vanishes from the record. Really. It is not totally clear
whether Scott Joplin was still living in Texarcana when this happened.

(06:37):
Eventually he started working as a traveling musician, so he
was away from town a lot. There's also some evidence
that he spent part of his late teens living in Sidalia, Missouri,
possibly with a relative, and if that's the case, he
may have gone to Lincoln High School, which was that
town segregated high school for black children. Regardless of exactly

(07:00):
when Joplin got there. Sidalia would become a big part
of Joplin's life and his development as a musician and composer.
Cidalia is southeast of Kansas City and south southwest of
Saint Louis, and in the late eighteen eighties, it was
surrounded mostly by farmland. It was a railroad hub and
a shipping center for the livestock and produce that were

(07:21):
raised on all of those farms. So, in addition to
its year round community of about fourteen thousand people, it
also had a lot of businesses and entertainment that catered
to railroad workers, business people, and other people who passed
through the town for work. So that meant a lot
of saloons, dance halls, gambling halls, and brothels, which meant

(07:43):
there were also a lot of places for performers to
play music, and that meant people found a niche supporting
those musicians. There were at least four different businesses in
Cidalia dedicated to selling instruments and music. The town of
Sidalia had a contentious relationship with the railroads that made
such a big part of its economy and the people

(08:05):
and the businesses that those railroads seemed to attract. Part
of Main Street was essentially a red light district, and
it became so notorious for fighting and other violence that
it was nicknamed Battle Row. Various mayors and city councils
ran campaigns to quote clean up Main Street by getting
rid of vice and crime, and none of that was

(08:27):
particularly successful. This was the sort of place where the
law and law enforcement did not really act as a deterrent.
People who got arrested for gambling or sex work or
some other activity just basically paid their fine and then
went back to what they were doing. Racial discrimination was
also widespread in Cidalia. Most of the black population lived

(08:49):
north of the railroad tracks, in a part of town
known as Lincolnville, which is also where Lincoln High School was.
Two different black social clubs were established in Cidalia by
the end of the nineteen century, the Maple Leaf Club
and the Black four hundred Club. These were intended to
provide the same sort of respectable opportunities for socializing that

(09:09):
white men had in their social clubs, but both clubs
immediately faced suspicion from Cidalia's white community, both because of
racist bias against their membership and because of speculation that
they were going to try to influence the black community's
voting patterns. People thought it was basically a front for
the Republican Party. To be clear, these two clubs also

(09:32):
faced criticism from within the black community, especially from church leaders,
who thought that the card playing and drinking that could
go on there was sinful and harmful to society. This
was doubly true since at least one of these two
clubs served alcohol even though it was not licensed to
do so, and at one point enough fights broke out

(09:52):
at the Black four hundred Club that the city council
shut it down. Joblin's exact whereabouts aren't clear for parts
of the eight in eighteen nineties, we don't know exactly
when he moved to Cidelia or where all he traveled
as an itinerant musician, and he also seems to have
gone back to tech sarcana from time to time. The

(10:12):
first written mention we have of him as a musician
is from eighteen ninety one. Various people who knew Scott
Joplin as a young man describes him as quiet, smart,
with good manners, and very serious, including being very serious
about learning and playing music. In addition, to dedicating himself

(10:32):
to studying and practicing. He also seemed innately talented as
a composer. One description that gets repeated a lot is
unclear as to who originally said it, but it's quote.
He did not have to play anybody else's music. He
made up his own and it was beautiful. He just
got his music out of the air. The first written

(10:53):
mention of Joplin as a musician isn't quite as auspicious.
Though we've talked about minstrel shows, several previous episodes of
the show, most recently in our two part are on
Irving Berlin this past December. The roots of minstrelsy included
everything from white performers in blackface playing roles like Shakespeare's Othello,

(11:14):
to white performers lampooning black people in racist caricatures designed
for white audiences. White musicians also appropriated music and dance
styles that had been created by black musicians and performers,
and they did those on stage in blackface. The style
of performance was so popular among white audiences that some

(11:35):
black performers adopted it as well, for a range of reasons,
including just having no other viable option for finding paid work.
As a performer. We don't really know Scott Joplin's thought process,
but his first documented performances were as part of a
minstrel troupe called the tech Sarcana Minstrels. One of this

(11:55):
troope's performances in eighteen ninety one caused particular controversy. It
was that a Confederate Veterans Association reunion, and the performers
learned only after signing a contract that the event was
being used as a fundraiser to build a memorial for
Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who had died in eighteen eighty nine.

(12:17):
The participation of a black minstrel troop in a fundraiser
for a Jefferson Davis memorial caused outrage among the black
residents of Texarcana. The Southwestern Christian Advocate was a newspaper
published by the Methodist Episcopal Church, and its coverage of
this was scathing. It listed the troops members, including Scott Joplin,

(12:39):
before saying quote their action dishonors their race and curses
the memories of John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison,
Calvin Fairbank, and the host of abolitionists that fought and
bled that they might enjoy the privilege of organizing such
a troop. The troop countered that they had not known
about the fundraiser, and they were happy about it, and

(13:01):
none of the money they had been paid was being
put toward the memorial. The next couple of years of
Scott Joplin's life are once again unclear, but he most
likely went to Chicago for the World's Colombian Exposition in
eighteen ninety three, possibly as part of the Texas Medley Quartet.
He probably didn't play in the expo itself. For the

(13:23):
most part, people of color were only allowed to participate
in the official exposition as part of the Ethnological Pavilion,
which was basically a human zoo. Their indigenous people from
North America and people from other countries lived in quote
ethnic villages, but there were a lot of black musicians

(13:44):
who performed at other venues in Chicago during the expo,
just outside of the established exposition grounds. This was to
the point that the World's Columbian Exposition is often cited
as the event that launched the popularization of ragtime. So
ragtime this is a syncopated musical style whose influences included

(14:05):
minstrel music, honky tonk piano playing, and the cakewalk. The
cakewalk needs its own explanation. Prior to the US Civil War,
enslaved people arranged in a square would dance in a
way that mimicked the behaviors and mannerisms of white people.
This was a contest, with enslavers and their families acting

(14:26):
as judges. Often the winners were awarded a cake or
some other treat or luxury item. This evolved into a
form of entertainment that lasted beyond the end of the
Civil War. It was incorporated into minstrel shows and also
continued to be done as a contest, and the cakewalk
also evolved into a syncopated, march like musical genre. Ragtime

(14:49):
was still a very new style of music when the
World's Columbian Exposition was held in eighteen ninety three. The
term ragtime would not even be coined to describe it
for another years, and it also was not particularly respected
as a musical style. It had been developed, written, and
performed primarily by black musicians, so there was racism involved

(15:12):
in white audience's reactions to it. Some of the same
rhythms that were common in ragtime had also been used
by white menstrual performers and caricatures of black people. They
were sort of a musical cue that a character was
meant to be seen as bumbling or inept. Also, a
lot of the people who wrote and played ragtime were

(15:33):
performing in places like brothels and taverns, often because those
were the only places where black musicians in the area
could find work. So a lot of people black and
white associated ragtime with sex, work, gambling, and other vice.
But after the World's Columbian Exposition, as its popularity grew,
it very gradually shed a little bit of that connotation.

(15:57):
Joplin seems to have toured with the Texas Lea Quartet
in eighteen ninety three in eighteen ninety four, and then
he either moved to or went back to Cidalia, where
he boarded with the family of Arthur Marshall. Joplin became
Marshall's music teacher, and Marshall, who became a ragtime performer
and composer himself, described Japplin this way quote, he was

(16:19):
kind to all of us musicians that would, just as
I say, flock around him because he was an inspiration
to us. All. We always treated him as daddy to
the bunch of piano players here in Sidalia. Joplin and
Marshall were also two of the many ragtime musicians who
would wind up spending at least some time in Cidalia,

(16:40):
or live there permanently, or be born there. This town
eventually became known as the cradle of classic ragtime. Japlin
also continued to focus on his own education, and he
took classes at the George Arsmith College for Negroes in
eighteen ninety six. That college burned in a fire in
nineteen twenty five and all of its records were destroyed,

(17:02):
so we don't know any of the details of his coursework.
He was in his twenties by this point, and he
probably wasn't formally seeking a degree, but was instead taking
individual classes to continue building his musical knowledge. He also
continued to travel and work as a musician, and his
first piece of music was published in Syracuse, New York,

(17:24):
suggesting he was there at the time. This was Please
Say What You Will, which had a copyright date of
February twentieth, eighteen ninety five, so at that point Joplin
was about twenty seven. We also know he was back
in Texas at some point and may have been at
the spectacle known as the Crash at Crush. He may
not have been, He may have just heard about it regardless,

(17:45):
though he published his Great Crush Collision March in Temple,
Texas a few weeks after the Crash at Crush. We've
talked about the Crash at Crush on the show before,
and we are going to bring it out as an
upcoming Saturday classic. Plin seems to have spent most of
the late eighteen nineties mostly settled in Cidalia, where he
joined the Queen City Coronet Band. He started teaching other

(18:09):
ragtime players and composers, going on to collaborate with many
of them. We already mentioned Arthur Marshall, whose later collaborations
with Japlin included SWIPSI Cakewalk. Another of Japlin students was
Scott Hayden, and the songs they wrote together included Sunflower Slowdrag.
One of Sidalia's music dealers was a man named John Stark,

(18:29):
and that's who published Joplin's first really major success, which
was Maple Leaf Rag. It's possible that this piece was
named after Cidalia's Maple Leaf Social Club. Stark saw himself
as a publisher of serious music, and he thought that
Ragtime was worthy of the same consideration as the work
of classical composers. He published Maple Leaf Rag in eighteen

(18:52):
ninety nine. Although Joplin had probably started working on writing
at a couple of years before, people in Cidalia seemed
to have heard it before it was officially published. Joplin
also got advice from an attorney when he negotiated his
publishing contract, was Stark, which included a royalty of one
cent for each copy of the sheep Music sold. Stark

(19:14):
actually had some doubts about this piece of music. He
thought it was just too complex to sell well to
the general public, and it might even be too complex
for its composer, and sales of Maple Leaf Rag did
take a bit to really get going, but once they did,
the piece sold steadily and well for years, earning Joplin
and estimated six hundred dollars annually. That would have been

(19:37):
enough to take care of rent, food, and his other
most basic needs. One of the reasons this piece sold
so well was that Stark was really good at marketing it,
and at marketing Joplin himself. Stark was probably the first
person to call Joplin, the King of ragtime writers. That
was something that he printed on the covers of Japlin's
Sheep Music. Stark also wrote of this piece of music, quote,

(20:00):
the maple Leaf Rag marks an era in musical composition.
It has throttled and silenced those who oppose syncopations. It
is played by the cultured of all nations, and is
welcomed in the drawing rooms and boudoirs of good taste.
We don't often get to include the music itself when
we're talking about historical composers or performers. A lot of

(20:21):
the time, recording technology just didn't exist yet, or if
it did, those recordings have not survived, or in terms
of more recent musicians, there may be copyright or licensing
issues that keep us from being able to use it.
But one of the ways Scott Joplin recorded his music
was by creating piano roles. Those are the roles that
would play the music on a player piano. And Joplin

(20:44):
made a role for Maple Leaf Rag in nineteen sixteen,
and we're going to play that. Now. This was late
in life and he was not playing as well as
he did in earlier years, and we're going to talk
about that more after a sponsor break. After the success

(21:46):
of Maple Leaf Rag, a lot of musicians and composers
that Scott Joplin had taught, or played with or collaborated
with said they had had a hand in its creation.
Musicians also started playing and recording it and selling their recordings,
and a lot of composers wrote new rags that drew
from it really heavily, and Joplin himself also wrote other

(22:09):
rags that kind of referred back to it musically. So
in addition to being a steady moneymaker for Scott Joplin,
Maple Leaf Rag also became a big influence on the
genre of ragtime as a whole. In nineteen hundred, John
Stark moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, where he continued to
publish and market a lot of Joplin's compositions. That same year,

(22:31):
Scott Joplin married Bell Jones Hayden, who was the widow
of Joe Hayden, brother of Joplin's students Scott Hayden. The
couple had one child together, a daughter who died as
a baby. Scott and Bell did not seem to have
been very well matched, and their marriage ended sometimes shortly
after their daughter's death. By this point, Joplin had become

(22:52):
well known in Sidalia and was well respected among ragtime
musicians and composers and within the black community more generally.
He co founded the pd haastan Republican club for Black Republicans.
This was named for a former mayor of Cidalia who
was white but had made a point of speaking to
black churches and social organizations and of hiring black officers

(23:14):
for Cidalia's police force. Joplin had also started a baseball team,
but in nineteen oh one he decided to move to
Saint Louis as well, although he went back to Cidalia
several times after that. As we said earlier, ragtime wasn't
entirely respected as a musical genre. Starting in the early
twentieth century, it was increasingly part of the music of

(23:37):
Tin Pan Alley, which we talked about in our episodes
on Irving Berlin. That meant a lot more white musicians
were incorporating ragtime elements into their music, which were then
more widely heard by white audiences. So ragtime started to
lose some of its associations with sex work and gambling,
and white audiences who were introduced to it through tinpan

(23:58):
Alley didn't necessarily know that it was a genre that
had been developed mainly by black performers and composers. But
none of this meant that it was being taken seriously
as a musical style. It had become thought of as
popular music, but not high art. Joplin thought ragtime was
worthy of respect as serious music, and he also wanted

(24:22):
to make his way into musical genres that already commanded
that kind of respect. In nineteen o two, he published
a ragtime ballet called The Ragtime Dance. Shortly after that,
he published his first opera, The Guest of Honor, which
sadly no longer exists. This opera is believed to have
been inspired by booker T. Washington's visit to the White

(24:44):
House in nineteen o one. One reason why no copy
of this opera survives is that Joplin's efforts to stage
it and take it on tour were just plagued with misfortunes.
He seems to have file a copyright application that was lost.
He established a drama company, rented a theater, and a
held rehearsals, but the tour manager disappeared along with the

(25:06):
money that was supposed to be used to pay for
the boarding house for the company was staying. The boarding
house manager seized everything that the company had to pay
the bill, and that included the scripts and the music.
In nineteen oh four, Joplin published The Cascades, which was
named for a series of waterfalls, lagoons, and water features

(25:26):
that were constructed for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was another expo,
this one was held in Saint Louis. That same year,
he got married again to a woman named Freddy Alexander.
This is the only one of Joplin's marriages that is
really documented in terms of something like a marriage license.
It's possible that his other two marriages were common law marriages.

(25:48):
This wedding took place in the Alexander family home in
Little Rock, Arkansas, on June fourteenth, nineteen oh four. Afterward,
the couple moved to Sedalia, traveling there by train with
stops along the way for Joplin to perform. Sadly, Scott
and Freddie's marriage lasted only ten weeks. Shortly after they
got back to Cidelia, Freddie became ill and she never recovered.

(26:12):
She died of pneumonia on September tenth, nineteen o four,
at the age of twenty. Joplin seems to have been
deeply devoted to her and as attentive as he could
be throughout her illness, while also trying to earn money
to support the two of them. One newspaper article said
of it, quote, throughout her sickness, mister Joplin has administered

(26:32):
to every want. We mentioned earlier that Joplin had returned
to Cidalia at various points after moving to Saint Louis.
He doesn't seem to have gone back again. After Freddie died,
Maple Leaf rag was still an incredibly popular piece of music,
and pianists had started competing with one another about how
fast they could play it. This was part of a

(26:54):
greater trend within ragtime that syncopation in the music can
give it a liveliness that can make it seem like
it should be played very quickly. That seems to have
gotten on Scott Joplin's nerves. He thought a lot of
ragtime was musically complex in a way that just got
lost if people played it too fast. He started publishing

(27:15):
notes to this effect in his music, beginning with Leola
which was published in nineteen oh five. The sheet music
for that included this text quote notice exclamation point, don't
play this piece fast. It is never right to play
ragtime fast. Author. In nineteen oh seven, Joplin started working

(27:36):
on another opera, Tree Menetia, which he stressed was a
grand opera, not a work of ragtime. This was a
three act opera set on a plantation in Arkansas, in
an isolated area that white people had essentially abandoned after
the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
Its characters were freed black people, including a couple named

(27:59):
Ned and Moniche, who prayed to be able to have
a child, and after finding a baby under a tree,
they named her Treemonisha. This opera is set when Treemonisha
is eighteen. She's the only educated member of her community.
She becomes a teacher and a leader, dispelling their superstitions
and reducing the influence of a pastor who is named

(28:21):
Parson all Talk. In the end, Treemonisha helps bring her
community into a more modern era while still retaining their identity.
Some elements in this opera can seem a little jarring today,
but at the time it had a lot in common
with the ideas of racial uplift that were promoted by
people like W. E. B. Du Boys and Booker T. Washington.

(28:45):
Around the same time that he started working on Treemonisha,
Joplin moved to New York City, at first living in
a boarding house near Tin Pan Alley. In New York,
Chaplin composed, performed tap music lessons, and started making piano
role of his music for player pianos. He became an
active member of the Colored Vodevillian Benevolent Association, a professional

(29:08):
and support organization for black performers. He also got married
once again, this time to Lottie Stokes. It's not clear
exactly when that happened. There are various references to him
and newspapers and minutes of meetings and things like that,
where one would expect that if he was married, his
wife would be there, but like Lottie, is not mentioned.

(29:29):
It's just a little vague. In nineteen oh eight, Joplin
self published a pamphlet called School of Ragtime Six Exercises
for Piano. As its name suggests, this was a set
of instructions and musical exercises for learning how to play ragtime.
In it, he reiterated his distaste for playing unnecessarily quickly.

(29:50):
Quote we wish to say here that the Joplin ragtime
is destroyed by careless or imperfect rendering, and very often
good players lose the effect entirely by playing too fast.
They are harmonized with the supposition that each note will
be played as it is written as it takes this
and also the proper time divisions to complete the sense intended.

(30:15):
That same year, Joplin started publishing with Seminary Music, which
was a subsidiary established by Ted Snyder, and it shared
an office with Ted Snyder Music. That name sounds familiar.
Irving Berlin started working for Ted Snyder around this same time.
Joplin finished Treemenisha in nineteen eleven and unsuccessfully started looking

(30:37):
for a publisher, and this led to one of Irving
Berlin's plagiarism accusations. Joplin submitted Treemenisha to Ted Snyder, and
it's possible that Irving Berlin saw it. That same year,
Berlin published Alexander's Ragtime Band, and the melody of the
verses in that song had some similarities to the melody

(30:59):
of a song from Treemonisha called a Real Slow Drag
that was not the exact same tune, and the two
songs were written in totally different styles, but there was
a series of notes that was similar enough that, according
to other people who Joplin knew, he thought that Berlin
had copied it. Japlin also reworked part of a Real

(31:21):
Slow Drag in nineteen thirteen, and according to Lottie, this
was to make it sound less like Alexander's Ragtime Band.
Japlin wasn't able to find a publisher for Treemonisha, and
he ultimately ended up self publishing the score. It was
well received in the American Musician and Art Journal, which
Japlin had a previous relationship with. He tried to stage

(31:44):
a production of the opera in Atlantic City, but it
was canceled before it even opened. Parts of it were
performed only a couple of times at most during Japlin's lifetime,
including once by students from the Martin Smith Music School
of Harlem. In nineteentheen, Japlin established Scott Joplin Music Publishing
Company with Lottie as co owner. A year later, he

(32:07):
published his last new piece of music, that was Magnetic Rag.
That same year, Scott and Lottie moved to Harlem, where
he worked as a piano teacher and Lottie operated a
boarding house. At some point in his life, possibly before
the start of the twentieth century, Scott Joplin had contracted syphilis.

(32:28):
At this point, syphilis was an incredibly widespread disease and
a major public health issue. Syphilis is caused by a bacteria,
and antibiotics had not been invented yet. The treatments that
did exist involved poisons like mercury and arsenic so not
only did they not cure the disease, but they could
also harm the patient, and because syphilis is usually sexually transmitted,

(32:53):
it also carried just a lot of stigma. We don't
know for sure whether Joplin received any of these treatment
for syphilis, or whether he was given the blood test
that was used to officially diagnose it. That test was
introduced in nineteen o nine, but based on the descriptions
of his condition in his last years of life, he

(33:13):
almost certainly developed tertiary syphilis. This is the final stage
of the progression of syphilis, and it often involves neurological symptoms,
including memory loss, unusual behavior, and difficulty with physical coordination.
We mentioned that the piano role of maple Leaf rag
that we played earlier was recorded in nineteen sixteen, and

(33:35):
that Joplin was not playing as well as he had
earlier in his life. And this is why, in addition
to the effects on his skills as a piano player,
tertiary syphilis affected Joplin's mental health and cognitive abilities. He
started behaving erratically, and he destroyed a lot of his manuscripts,
and he had to be hospitalized in mid January of

(33:56):
nineteen seventeen. He was transferred to a mental institution a
month later. Scott Joplin died on April first, nineteen seventeen,
at Manhattan State Hospital and was buried in an unmarked
pauper's grave at Saint Michael's Cemetery in East Elmhurst, Queens.
He was about forty eight years old. Joplin's death went

(34:17):
almost entirely unreported in the media, although it was covered
in at least three Black newspapers. During his lifetime, Joplin
had written more than one hundred ragtime pieces, a ballet,
and two operas. But in spite of Lottie's efforts to
continue to promote his work and secure licensing deals and

(34:37):
renew the copyrights, everything but Maple Leaf Rag was quickly forgotten.
Joplin was even almost erased from work about black people's
contributions to music. In nineteen thirty six, Alan Locke published
The Negro and His Music, in which he referenced Maple
Leaf Rag and Palm Leaf Rag and described Joplin as

(34:58):
a white performer who served quote bracketed credit with Negro pioneers.
During his life, Joplin had told a lot of musicians
and interviewers that people would not appreciate his music until
fifty years after his death, and that turned out to
be eerily prescient. There was a brief or sergeant of

(35:18):
ragtime in the nineteen forties, as jazz musicians and musical
scholars worked to uncover the roots of that genre. But
then there was a second, much greater ragtime revival in
the nineteen seventies. During that nineteen seventies revival, two different
events really brought Joplin's work back into public consciousness. In

(35:38):
nineteen seventy, classical music label None Such Records published Piano
Rags by Scott Joplin, played by pianist Joshua Rifkin. Two
other volumes of Joplin's music followed, with all of them
best sellers on the classical music charts, and in nineteen
seventy one, pianist and music historian Via Brodsky Lawrence compiled

(36:00):
and edited a print work, The Complete Works of Scott Joplin,
which was published through the New York Public Library. As
Joplin's popularity took off in the early seventies, Morehouse College
and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra staged Treemonisia in full for
the first time in nineteen seventy two. In nineteen seventy three,
Marvin hamlesh arraigned Joplin's music for the score of the

(36:23):
movie The Sting, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman. I
know a lot of white kids who grew up in
the seventies and eighties had their first their first Scott
Joplin exposure from that movie. The Sting won a giant
pile of Academy Awards, including one for its score. In
nineteen seventy five, Treemonisha ran on Broadway. In nineteen seventy six,

(36:47):
the Pulitzer Board honored Scott Joplin with a special award
recognizing his contributions to American Music the American Society of Composers,
Authors and Publishers. You might know that as ASCAP had
a marker installed at Joplin's grave site in nineteen seventy four.
The house where he lived in Saint Louis was recognized

(37:07):
as a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy six. A
Scott Joplin biopick was released in nineteen seventy seven, with
Billy D. Williams in the role of Joplin. In nineteen
eighty three, he was recognized with a postage stamp. Today
there is an annual outdoor ragtime concert in Joplin's honor
at Saint Michael's Cemetery in Queens. This year it is

(37:29):
scheduled for Saturday May twentieth. There's also a Scott Joplin
Ragtime Festival in Sadalia, Missouri, arranged by the Scott Joplin
International Ragtime Foundation, and this year that's being held May
thirty first to June third, A Scott Chaplin, do you
have some listener mail for us? I do. We got

(37:50):
some listmail from Chris who wrote in after our Vivisection
episode with an email with some information about ways to
reduce animal testing, and this email says, Hi, Holly and Tracy. First,
I've been listening to your pod for years. I love
how you cover all sorts of history, topics, arts, science, events, etc.

(38:11):
There was an earlier episode I was going to write
to you about this month, but I didn't write it
down in time. I have to go figure out which
one that was, so you might hear from me again soon.
Regarding the vivisection episode, I wanted to provide some insight
on what's going on with this from an industry perspective.
My career field is product stewardship in the chemical and

(38:32):
plastic industry that includes looking at toxicology data. I always
try to find existing studies or use what we call
rita cross data, using data on a substance that is similar.
If those sources don't exist, there are quite a few
free modeling software programs that can be used to help
indicate toxicological effects of a chemical. Both the us EPA

(38:55):
and the eu ECCHA European Chemicals Agency provide models and
guidance on this. The companies that I have worked for
only use animal testing as a last resort when government
agencies require it. In recent years, both the US and
EU have been encouraging new approach methods or nams to
reduce animal testing. Below are a couple of links regarding

(39:18):
the effort to reduce animal testing while still being able
to identify hazards of chemical substances. Then there's a series
of links to various alternatives and trainings. Thank you for
all that you two do. If you ever need a
chemistry geek to check something with, I'm here for you
as a pet tax I've included picks of my three
rescued babies. The chihuahua mix in the pineapple is the youngest,

(39:43):
named Zori. She's a monster. The sleeping mini dawson is
my oldest, named Stella. She's a cuddler. The chihuahua with
the big ears is Josha. She's a chicken, but that's
because she was mistreated before she was rescued. Have a
lovely day. That is from Chris Man. These a are
some very just in a pineapple with kind of a

(40:11):
why are you bothering me? Face? Is how I read this. Yes,
all incredibly adorable. So thank you so much for this
email and for these great pictures. We've gotten a couple
of emails from folks who have apologized for not having
any animals in their lives. That's okay. You don't need

(40:33):
to apologize if you don't have to send pictures of anything.
But you could send pictures of a tart you made,
or I don't know, a pretty flowery style side literally anything.
So but you don't need to be sorry if you
don't have a picture or anything to send. If you
would like to send us an email about this or
any other podcast, we're at History podcast that iHeartRadio dot

(40:55):
com and we're all over social media. Admission History. That's
where we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(41:17):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

The Bobby Bones Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Scott Joplin