Scott Joplin
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ragtime was the first musical style pioneered primarily by black musicians to gain widespread popularity across the United States and eventually throughout the world.

The pioneer of this genre was Scott Joplin. Born in Texas around 1868 (records are spotty) to a freeborn mother and a father who had been emancipated from slavery after the Civil War, Joplin was faced with many adversities in his life. He was partly self-taught on the piano, learned a bit from his mother, and took a few lessons from a German teacher. His family moved to Texarkana, a small town at the corner of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He travelled around the South, eventually settling in Sedalia, Missouri in and studying formally at a segregated college in 1895. Drawing on the different varieties of music he had experienced in his travels and studies, he began composing a new style of music that became ragtime.

It was Joplin’s 1899 “Maple Leaf Rag” that first gained him national attention. That same year, he married Belle Jones, they had a child together, and moved to St. Louis to be closer to his publisher.

Like the concert marches popular at the time, ragtime uses a tonic/dominant bassline (usually scored in the tuba) and upbeat triads (usually scored in the horn). When played on the piano, this pattern is called "ragging." The musical theory, harmony, and structure also derive from marches. Joplin’s “Pineapple Rag,” for example, is in a standard march form. From African music, ragtime takes highly syncopated rhythmic patterns, which is generally worked into the melody and played in the right hand.

Tragedy struck when Joplin’s child died in infancy, and he and his wife divorced in 1903. He married again the following year, but his second wife, Freddie, died of pneumonia just ten weeks later. Nevertheless, the first decade of the 1900s was very productive and Joplin composed some of his most popular works, including "The Entertainer" in 1902 and "Pineapple Rag" in 1908.

Aspiring to be taken more seriously as a musician, Joplin moved to New York in 1907 and began composing operas, seeking to create a uniquely American form rooted in ragtime, spirituals, and blues. However, he struggled to get his operas produced. With his third wife, Lottie Stokes, he co-founded a publishing company in 1909 in an attempt to self-produce his second opera, "Treemonisha." (Joplin's first opera, "A Guest of Honor," has been lost.) However, although they managed to self-publish some piano arrangements from the work, they were unable to get the opera staged.

After this, Joplin's physical and mental health began to decline. In 1916, he was diagnosed with syphilis and committed to a mental institution, dying there the following year.

The ragtime genre Joplin had pioneered was picked up by other black musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and eventually broke the color barrier as composers like George Gershwin and even Sousa himself began writing in the style.