Like his father, he worked as a railway laborer, but in the late 1880's he left that job to travel around the South as a freelance musician. Eventually he started a vocal quartet, taught mandolin and guitar, and learned to play cornet and violin. His interest in music increased as he grew older. As a teenager he attended Lincoln High School and worked as a dance musician. He had perfect pitch and quickly became proficient on piano and banjo. Joplin was an ambitious and serious-mannered kid. To make sure Joplin could keep practicing, Weiss helped them buy a used piano. Giles left his wife and family for another woman, and Florence became a single mother of six children. Weiss tutored Joplin for five years, introducing him to musical styles ranging from operas to folk melodies. The family could not afford to pay him, so he taught for free. Weiss became interested in Scott's talent and offered him private music lessons. ![]() At the age of seven, Scott was allowed to play the piano while his mother cleaned in one of her customer's homes.Īround age eleven, he caught the attention of Julis Weiss, a Jewish music teacher who had emigrated tonTexas from Germany. They taught their children a little music. On the plantation where he was born, Giles played the violin at parties and Florence sang and played the banjo. Giles was a railroad laborer, and Florence cleaned homes for a living. The family lived on the Texas border in Texarkana, Arkansas. Florence was a free-born African American from Kentucky. Giles was an ex-slave from North Carolina. He was the second of six children of Giles Joplin and Florence Gibbons. No one knows exactly when Scott Joplin was born, but it was around November 1868. Before there was the Duke and the Count, there was the King. The ragtimes of Scott Joplin and others influenced the development of early jazz and especially jazz pianists, including Eubie Blake, Thomas "Fats" Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. Like technology, musical styles sometimes persist long past the point of being fashionable. Thus the music roll, invented in the 1880's, has persisted into the twenty-first century. These interfaces often feature a digital music roll, which allows musicians to place every note at a timestamp and play it back with a computer. Many film soundtracks are now crafted using this type of software. Digital audio workstations enable users to create music using virtual instruments. Physical music rolls are now outdated technology, but it's interesting to note that their design has influenced modern software. This was a way of sharing music before recorded audio was commonplace. These rolled up pieces of paper, perforated for machines to read, were fed into player pianos and played back as music. In the early 1900's, that is how many people would have first heard them. ![]() You don't need a pianist to hear a rag, if you have a music roll and a player piano. The story of his life is filled with tragedy and suffering, but his art endures. Joplin's music has earned a place in our culture despite a relentless string of professional and personal setbacks. However, as you'll find, in some ways it's surprising we know his name at all. Scott Joplin, a African American man who was called "the king of ragtime", was the most famous composer of piano rags who ever lived.
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