American Schubert

By Michael Walsh

Is there an American composer more important, more familiar and yet more obscure than Scott Joplin? His signature tune, The Maple Leaf Rag (1899), was the first piece of sheet music in America to sell a million copies, and after the 1973 release of the film The Sting and its accompanying soundtrack, his rag The Entertainer was heard constantly all over the country. And yet this genius, whose ambition it was to merge white European classical forms with black American rhythms and harmonies, has remained a shadowy historical figure, a mysterious creature of the late 19th century urban demimonde.

For years the standard reference work on Joplin's life was They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, a 1950 study based largely on interviews with surviving original ragtimers. But oral history is necessarily flawed, since recollection fails with the passage of years, and a more scholarly, rigorous treatment was called for. Now comes King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era by ragtime scholar Edward A. Berlin (Oxford; 334 pages; $25); it immediately supplants the earlier book as the most accurate and informative Joplin biography.

Berlin has a sure grasp of the ragtime era; his earlier Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History is an exemplary scholarly monograph on a complicated subject. The Joplin biography is equally formidable in its research. Combing census records, city directories and newspaper files across the Midwest, Berlin follows in detail Joplin's travels from his birthplace near Texarkana, Texas (his father Giles was a freed slave), through the bandstands and bordellos of the Mississippi to Tin Pan Alley, the budding popular-music scene in New York City. Berlin then recounts Joplin's syphilis-induced descent into madness, a deterioration that ended with his death in Manhattan in 1917 at age 49. Joplin earned a penny for each copy of The Maple Leaf Rag that was sold, but he died broke as a result of his creeping insanity and his quixotic efforts to publish and produce his opera Treemonisha.

The author gives equally detailed attention to Joplin's music -- the early parlor songs, the magnificent piano rags, the waltzes and marches and Treemonisha, his great last work. Berlin's analysis is always illuminating and expert; however, nonmusical readers may have trouble following his arguments, illustrated as they are by plentiful examples from scores. There are tantalizing references to such lost works as a symphony, a piano concerto and the opera A Guest of Honor, which was registered for copyright in 1903, although no copy of the score is known to exist.

If ever an American composer was worthy of such thorough examination, surely Joplin is. His great accomplishment was to refine and perfect a kind of protojazz called ragtime. He did not invent it: black musicians along the Mississippi had long been syncopating, or "ragging," the rhythm of such forms as the march and the two-step, and Joplin was not even the first to publish a rag. But in his hands the nascent genre was quickly transformed into something worthy of the concert hall. Joplin's rags, beginning with the sprightly Original Rags and ending with the autumnal, resigned Magnetic Rag of 1914, his farewell to the genre, were elegant in construction and limpid in expression. Yet they fully partook of what Joplin called a "weird and intoxicating" rhythmic quality, a quality that enthralled listeners and enraged preachers.

No part of American musical culture is untouched by Joplin's influence. Stride piano, boogie-woogie, Dixieland, Big Band swing, blues, soul and rock 'n' roll -- to some degree, all these forms were adumbrated in Joplin's works. But Joplin's achievement transcends pop music; indeed, the soft-spoken, neatly dressed whorehouse pianist was a master melodist who would rightly be called an American Schubert.

Although he chronicles Joplin's activities with admirable exhaustiveness, Berlin stops short of exploring the inner life of his subject. That is unfortunate, for despite Joplin's constant travels and his uncanny knack for turning up in the right place at the precise point in history when his music would have the most impact (in Tin Pan Alley, for example, in the early 20th century), his life was not particularly full of incident, and his intellectual development may have been as important as any documented event. Joplin had a fierce desire to show the whites in America that blacks were their equal in every respect. Repeatedly he admonished his fellow blacks that education was the way to first-class citizenship, and indeed that is the explicit theme of Treemonisha.

Joplin believed passionately that neither the idiom of a composition nor the setting in which it was played had anything to do with its quality -- and that race had nothing to do with quality whatsoever. "What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay," he wrote in 1908. "Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at 'hateful ragtime' no longer passes for musical culture." In an age when the quest for "diversity" has turned into a form of cultural apartheid, Joplin's achievements and values serve as a reminder of just how potent cultural fusion can be.