1/5/2024 0 Comments Scott joplin ragtime kingIn 1893 Joplin made his way to Chicago to perform for the throngs who visited the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. Like many African American entertainers in the Mississippi valley in this period, Joplin improvised music that combined elements of the Western musical tradition-adopting such forms as the waltz, the schottische, and the march-with melodies and rhythms derived from African American musical culture. After refusing to give up piano playing for more steady employment as a railroad laborer, he left Texarkana sometime in the 1880s and supported himself as an itinerant musician. His parents, both of whom were talented musicians, encouraged the boy, and eventually the family acquired a used square piano for his use.Īs a teenager, Joplin began performing at various local events. While in Texarkana, the younger Joplin learned how to play piano, partly through his own efforts on an instrument owned by one of his mother’s employers and partly through lessons from a German music teacher, Julius Weiss. During his early childhood, the Joplin family lived on a plantation owned by William Caves, but in the 1870s they moved to the recently founded town of Texarkana, where Jiles Joplin began working for the railroad. Joplin was born on November 24, 1868, in Cass County, Texas, the second son of Jiles and Florence Joplin. He wrote two operas, one ragtime ballet, and forty-four original pieces, seven of which were in collaboration with other composers. Known during his lifetime as the “King of Ragtime Writers,” Scott Joplin was an African American musician and the foremost contributor to a “Missouri style” of ragtime music in the 1890s and early 1900s.
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