Scott Joplin & Black History Month

I have studied music and music history throughout my entire life, and a person who belongs on this list is Scott Joplin. Many people know him by name, as the King of Ragtime, but Joplin’s musical genius was beyond innovative, complicated piano compositions that helped create and define a genre of music that now rests in the dignified air of classical music. 

Joplin hit success primarily because his works were some of the first published musical compositions. This meant when the sheet music was sold, and his music played in some areas, he received a cut. Jim Crow laws were in full effect though, and to ignore the fact that music is color blind- that is, most people who heard his music loved it, but had no idea he was black, is ignorant. When people found out the color of his skin, some may have been surprised, many didn’t care, some perhaps were enlightened. But there is no question the color of Joplin’s skin limited his potential success, a story few people are aware of, a fact important in black history as any I know. 

In his later years Joplin wrote two operas, one, Treemonisha, a very thoughtful work dealing essentially with inequality, and people with the “darkness of superstition” in their minds, seeing the “light of reason”. Despite his most earnest efforts, this opera was never produced, though not for a lack of quality. 

Despite many people loving his work as a Ragtime composer, enough were not prepared to accept him as a composer of opera. Music may be color blind, but when the then known powers that be attached his music to the color of his skin, that was enough concern, bigotry, to keep him from fulfilling his dream. 

Joplin would later die a lonely man, in and out of care facilities dealing mostly with depression, at the age of just 48, buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. It would take another 50 years for Joplin to begin to receive the accolades he deserved, winning a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976.