Scott Joplin and the Queen City Cornet Band would play at dances in town, both Black and white. Music was one of the primary diversions in the thriving town, and bands would frequently march up and down the street. And a club that would come to define Scott Joplin’s fame through its name: the Maple Leaf. Running parallel to the tracks is Main Street, where within the span of three blocks or so, were three brothels, an Opera House, the Black 400 Club….
The white side of town was on the south side. In the 1890s, the African American side of town was north of the tracks. And the population was booming in the 1880s and 1890s, thanks to several major railroad lines that crossed there. The town is about three-quarters of the way across the state, toward Kansas City.
Ragtime King Scott Joplin began his career in earnest while living in Sedalia, Missouri. While in Chicago, Joplin was exposed to early ragtime, led a band playing cornet, and met Otis Saunders, a fellow musician who traveled with Joplin back to Missouri, where Scott Joplin would set about to writing the music that would soon make him a household name. Wells and Frederick Douglass pointed out, they were showcased only as examples of a so-called “savage” race. He's hearing all these things and they're kind of forming this blend.”Īt the World’s Fair in Chicago, Black people were mostly excluded from the White City, and were relegated to the Midway. His father's playing him plantation songs. His father, who had been born enslaved, was a musician. For Joplin, it's his classical training, but it's also the parlor music of the time, and the American folk music that he's hearing. That's really impacting what he's hearing, right? What he's hearing and who he's meeting… and as we know, as human beings that determines everything about your life and the choices that you make and the paths that you take. Pianist Lara Downes says location is everything when it comes to Joplin’s musical development: Johnson, but his most extensive training came from a Jewish German American, Julius Weiss, who taught the young Joplin music theory, an appreciation of music as a formal art form, and he encouraged Joplin to set high goals for himself.Īfter leaving Texas, accounts place Joplin in Chicago in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Scott Joplin’s early music education also came from the Black musician Mag Washington and native American/Black J.C. He was the second of six children, and his parents had musical talent-his mother, Florence, played the banjo and was a singer, his father Giles played violin. The Ku Klux Klan was active in northeast Texas, and Black laborers who worked in white family homes, such as Joplin’s mother, could be fined for leaving the home without permission, impudence, or swearing, among other “offenses” that could be deemed “disobedience.”īut Scott Joplin’s mother was determined to give her son an education, and by the age of 12, Joplin was living in Texarkana with his family, where he was in school, and learning music. The Civil War may have ended, but it was still a dangerous time for Black families in the south.
#SCOTT JOPLIN RAGTIME SERIES#
For this special series of African American Voices on KPAC, we’re looking back at Scott Joplin’s life and music, with the help of pianist Lara Downes, whose new album of Joplin’s music, “ Reflections,” reexamines his piano rags and melodies, some in fresh new arrangements, and Rick Benjamin, who reconstructed Joplin’s opera “Treemonisha” for a new generation.įlickr user QuesterMark Scott Joplin Historical Marker in Texarkana.īy most accounts, Scott Joplin was born near Texarkana, in 1868. But racism and a public that only saw him as a popular tunesmith stood in the way. He also was a “classical” musician, who aspired to write opera, a symphony, and a piano concerto. Scott Joplin was the King of Ragtime-a syncopated, march-like popular style of piano playing developed by Black musicians in the late 19th century. He grew up to be one of the most famous musicians in America as the 19th Century turned into the 20th … then died penniless and forgotten less than two decades after the height of his fame… only to be rediscovered and celebrated half a century later. He was born in Texas, just six years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and three years after the passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution.
0 kommentar(er)
