Scott Joplin

David Galligan        

Period 1

12/5/15

        Let’s take it from the top! I am Scott Joplin, a famous African American piano composer from Eastern Texas.  I wrote and published many well known pieces. My music helped make Ragtime popular. Any good piano player can play one of my songs.

        Life was hard in East Texas when I was born on November 24, 1868. My parents were uneducated, former slaves and we lived in extreme poverty. To make things worse, my father left the family when I was young and America was still reeling from the effects of the Civil War. I was raised by a single mother and my childhood was very tough. At age eleven, I was a skilled piano player. I spent every penny I could on sheet music. I practiced for hours on end and was determined to succeed.

As a young adult, when I was twenty, I moved to Missouri. Jonathan Stark signed me to a record deal. This was my first step on the road to success. I composed some of my most famous songs with Stark. The Entertainer, The Maple Leaf Rag, and the Palm Leaf Rag were some of my most famous works. I composed many rags, which is short for Ragtime. This was a popular style of music. Rags were upbeat, energetic, and made people want to dance. School of Ragtime was a piano book I composed full of my most famous songs.

New York City was my next stop on the road to fame. Here, I continued to perform and even played the piano for famous operas. I even wrote an opera. It was 230 pages long, had three acts, and even had an orchestral overture. This opera, Treemonisha, was one of the few composed by an African American. It was not successful and this caused me to be thrown into a deep depression. Shortly after, I died of untreated syphilis in 1917. I was only 49 years old.

Sadly, my most well known song did not realize its worldwide fame until decades after I died. In 1972, The Entertainer was featured in the film The Sting. This Robert Redford, Paul Newman movie won seven academy awards including one for best song. The Entertainer hit number three on Billboards “Hot 100”. New York Times wrote, “The whole nation began to take notice” about the piece. Even ice cream trucks began playing this song to attract customers. All of these things helped make it so widely known.