LOOKING FOR SCOTT JOPLIN

As boys, my brothers and I would bolt awake to the sounds of our boozing, dream-ridden father pounding away at Scott Joplin rags (flubbed chords, rhythmic misses, and all) on his chipped and cigarette-scarred Steinway grand. Ever since, the unconquerable cheerfulness of Joplin’s music has reminded me of bright hopes in nark nights.

This past year, after a lifetime of unexpressed kinship, I decided to try to get closer to Joplin and his music. And so my wife and I journeyed to Sedalia, Missouri, where Joplin found is soul as a composer; to St. Louis, where newspapers proclaimed him "king of ragtime composers"; and finally to his haunts in New York City, where he died with his dreams unfulfilled. We found both more and less then we’d expected.

Scott Joplin was born, as best as can be determined in the absence of birth records, in Texarkana, a twin city straddling parts of both Texas and Arkansas, two or three years after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865. It was a time of headlong railroad expansion and town building, all set in a seemingly endless agrarian landscape. African Americans, freed from slavery but uneducated, unmoneyed, and for the most part unwelcome in the white world, took the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Joplin's father, born a slave in North Carolina, was a farmer and railroad laborer; his mother, freeborn in Kentucky, took menial work in white households.

Somehow Scott’s mother arranged piano lessons for him from a university-educated, opera loving German immigrant named Julius Weiss, who tutored the children of a white family for whom Mrs. Joplin did chores. Scott was hardly the only musical Joplin. His parents, three brothers, and two sisters were all fine singers, and they fearlessly took up instruments. Father Jiles favored the fiddle, mother Florence the banjo. By their teens the Joplin children were playing all kinds of strings and brass and percussion-and pounding away on any available piano. Robert, a year younger than Scott, would become a song-and-dance vaudevillian and cake walker. Will, seven years younger still, toured as a lead singer with the Texas Medley Quartette and the Kentucky Rosebud Quartette. In Sedalia in 1899 the three brothers may have teamed up, in The Ragtime Dance, a ballet featuring about a dozen African-American dances, performed to Scott's original music.

Like other gifted black musicians of his day, Joplin could support himself (sometimes just barely) by playing or singing----at private parties, in brothels, at civic celebrations, in saloons. Or he could join a traveling vaudeville troupe, teach, compose, or sell songs. Around the time of Chicago's 1893 World's Fair, he was almost certainly in that city, where black musicians (outside the fairgrounds proper) introduced enthusiastic white audiences to the pleasures of ragtime.

After the Chicago fair closed, Joplin found work in Sedalia, Missouri, then made that rollicking railroad hub his home for several years. He played piano at two social clubs for black men. If Sedalia was the "cradle of ragtime," then those "abominable loafing places----hotbeds of immorality" (as Sedalia's black ministers characterized the two clubs) were its birthing rooms. There was the Black 400 at 106 East Main Street, and across the street, tenanting the second (top) floor of 121 East Main, was the Maple Leaf Club, which proudly touted its association with "Master Scott Joplin, the entertainer." Its name has lived on in the composition that made Joplin famous: Maple Leaf Rag.

As in Joplin's time, Main Street in Sedalia backs on the east-west-running railroad, which was then the Missouri Pacific. Now as then, the tracks split the town into black and white, poorer and richer. North of Main, the black neighborhood is a sparse collection of modest bungalows interspersed with ancient shacks. South of Main, the once thriving but now suburb-drained business district merges into a prosperous white neighborhood of stately Victorian houses.

Sanford Brunson ("Brun") Campbell, a white runaway boy-pianist from Kansas, told of traveling to Sedalia as a l5-yearold to seek music lessons from Joplin, his hero. Campbell, who dubbed himself the "Ragtime Kid" (and would end up as a barber in Venice, California, where he died in 1952), left a portrait of Joplin in about 1900: "He liked a little beer, and gambled some, but he never let such things interfere with his music. . . . He was. . . about 5 feet 7 inches tall, a good dresser. . . gentlemanly and pleasant, with a liking for companionship."

In Joplin's day Sedalia's sporting district ran down both sides of Main Street. Several brick buildings where he played still stand, their facades cracking, a hundred years older but holding on. The one building that every ragtime enthusiast would love to see here is gone: It housed the Maple Leaf Club. The lot is now occupied by Maple Leaf Park, a rock-walled enclosure where concerts are held during the Joplin Festival each June. On the sidewalk a four-foot-high pinkish marble monument erected in 1961 commemorates the club, Joplin, his proteges Scott Hayden and Arthur Marshall, and Joplin's music publisher, John Stark.

People who have poked around inside the old Main Street buildings tell of time stopped. Still visible on the walls of rooms and passageways are caricatures of popular madams and girls of a century ago; customers' signatures, initials, "I was here’s and lewd rhymes."

As 1901 dawned, Joplin was living in Sedalia with Belle Hayden, the widow of Scott Hayden's brother Joe; but the couple soon moved to St. Louis, which was starting to be known as the "ragtime capital of the world." Musicians from all over the country mingled downtown, in the city's mostly black, wide open Chestnut Valley district. Before long Joplin and a musical entrepreneur named Tom Turpin formed a strong bond of friendship. That bond benefited both: Turpin could provide excellent exposure for Joplin's music, and Joplin's growing fame gained Turpin business.

In more ways than one, Thomas Million Turpin was a big man in the notorious valley. He was an entertainer, impresario, bartender, saloonkeeper, raconteur, bouncer, and composer, all rolled into one-and an imposing one it was with his wide-shouldered, vast-chested 350 pounds. In 1900 Turpin opened the doors of the Rosebud Cafe, just a couple of blocks west of St. Louis's palatial new Union Station. The Rosebud was perfectly situated to waylay thirsty, lonely travelers coming off or about to board trains that connected St. Louis to points north, south, east, and west.

Within a year or two Turpin's bar had mushroomed into a multipurpose building advertising itself as a "headquarters for colored professionals": a 24-hour-a day drinking spot, cafe, pool hall, gambling den (with rooms available for the amorous), and nonstop piano talent show. Turpin's renown as both a player and a composer----his Harlem Rag of 1897 had been the first rag ever published by a black writer-drew the era's best ragtime pianists to the Rosebud. And Joplin added substantial star-power.

Today urban renewal, expressways, and government buildings have all but obliterated Chestnut Valley. Only Union Station, restored for a new life as a mall and upscale hotel, and still topped by a 232-foot Romanesque clock tower, remains as a landmark that Joplin would recognize. On the former site of the Rosebud Cafe, at 2200-22 Market Street, now stands an FBI field office.

No transcontinental trains run in or out of Union station anymore. They haven’t since 1978, but by carefully adjusting your gaze, you can imagine Joplin and other ragtimers on their way to jobs far or near, hurrying through the iron gates that linked the ornate vaults of the station with the cavernous train shed.

At the height of his fame in St. Louis, one misfortune after another befell Joplin. First came the death (cause unknown) of his brother Will, then in his mid-twenties. At about the same time, a daughter born to Belle and Scott died in infancy. Their marriage did not survive, and by early 1903 Belle had left him.

Now surrounded by vacant lots, the two-story brick building at 2658A Delmar is where Belle and Joplin lived after they arrived from Sedalia in 1901. They rented the second-floor flat. You can take a tour of the house, as we did (the building also includes a reconstruction of the Rosebud Cafe; for information, call 314-340-5790 or visit www. mostateparks.com/scottjoplin.htm). In the front room, overlooking Delmar, among other spare furnishings is a vintage upright piano similar to one Joplin might have played. At the back of the flat is the room that probably served as the couple's kitchen. It has a wooden table, an icebox, and cupboards reminiscent of the early twentieth century. From the east-looking window you can see the tip of the Union Station tower under St. Louis's downtown skyscrapers, and through a gap in the taller buildings, Eero Saarinen's monumental irrelevance, the 630-foot-high stainless- steel inverted catenary, the Gateway Arch.

Remaining in St. Louis, Joplin threw himself into the most ambitious project he had yet undertaken, writing and producing an opera called A Guest of Honor. By late 1903 he had completed rehearsals and set off on a six-week tour. But less than three weeks later, the tour ended in disaster when someone absconded with the box-office receipts.

Unable to pay its bills, Scott Joplin's Rag-time Opera Company disbanded. All copies of the opera disappeared----not one has been found. It seems safe to say, however, that the guest of honor in the title refers to Booker T. Washington, who in 1901 had become the first black man ever to be entertained at the White House, where he dined with President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt.

Broke and dispirited, Joplin resumed writing rags, teaching, and playing for hire. It must have cheered him to see St. Louis pulsating with excitement. In April 1904 the St. Louis World's Fair, celebrating the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase and the exploits of Lewis and Clark, had received the first of 19 million visitors. To mark the occasion, Joplin composed a rambunctious new rag. He called it The Cascades, a musical complement to the engineering marvel of waterfalls, shimmering pools, and dashing currents that drew gasps from dazzled fairgoers.

As he put the Guest of Honor debacle behind him, Joplin, in his mid-thirties, could look back on a career already more successful than any other black composer’s. After his first masterpiece, Maple Leaf Rag, he had created one gem after another. In 1901 it had been The Easy Winners, in 1902 The Entertainer. Both were destined for a Hollywood rebirth decades later in the score of the 1973 Oscar-winning film The Sting. By the summer of 1904 Joplin had published more than two dozen rags, marches, waltzes, cakewalks, even some oh-so-Victorian songs of love, loss, and longing.

And Joplin had fallen hopelessly in love. Her name was Freddie Alexander, and theirs is a heartbreaking story. Six months after they met, 19-year-old Freddie and Joplin were married in the Little Rock, Arkansas, home of her parents. Three months later, on September 10, 1904, Freddie was dead of pneumonia in Sedalia. Throughout her seven-week illness, said an obituary in the black Sedalia Conservator, "Mr. Joplin has administered to every want."

After burying Freddie, Joplin vanished for months. Then, in March 1905, he reappeared to copyright his first work since Freddie's death. It was a lovely ragtime waltz titled Bethena. The picture on Bethena's cover, the Joplin biographer Edward Berlin suggests, may be of none other than Freddie Alexander Joplin. If it is she, then Joplin, who was never known to mention Freddie after she died, had found his own way to memorialize his young wife.

Freddie's tragic death, moreover, may have driven a grieving Joplin to begin Treemonisha, the opera that would dominate the rest of his life. The first public notice of the opera appeared in the June 1907 American Musician and Art Journal: "Scott Joplin has been working a considerable time on a grand opera which will contain music similar to that sung by the negroes during slavery days, the music of today, the negro ragtime, and the music that the negro will use in the future. . . ."

Soon after the Art Journal article appeared, Joplin headed for New York City. More and more, that was where music and money met, which made it the right place to look for backers for Treemonisha. He intended to stay only a few weeks, but New York would be his home until he died.

Why did Joplin choose to focus most of his creative energies on this "grand opera"? The answer tells us much about the man and the musical world that shaped him.

The popular music that swirled around Joplin was a tangled mixture of musical styles, forms, and approaches. There were, for example, bushels of sentimental love ballads. There was also sprightly vaudeville and minstrel-show fare, which already exhibited some musical hallmarks of what came to be called ragtime. Long before ragtime got its name, its characteristics had showed up across the performance spectrum-in piano, vocal, and instrumental arrangements----and caused, in most listeners, what Joplin described as "that weird and intoxicating effect." That strange feeling, most musicologists agree, arises from using syncopation, which "rags" a tune's delivery by stressing a weak beat, rather than the expected strong one. A regular bass beat (left hand on the piano) also usually accompanies the syncopation (right hand). Today the origins of ragtime are much debated, but Joplin had no doubt where his music came from.

"Ragtime rhythm is a syncopation original with the colored people. . . ." he would tell Lester Walton of the black weekly New York Age in 1913. "There has been ragtime music in America ever since the Negro race has been here, but white people took no notice of it until about 20 years ago."

Unfortunately, vocal ragtime quickly became a vehicle for a constant stream of "coon songs," written in supposed Negro dialect and heavily weighted with demeaning stereotypes. Early in his career, Joplin himself had written such lyrics. As his confidence grew, however, he rejected the popular convention.

Joplin was determined to take ragtime, not the offensive lyrics but the sophisticated tunes and rhythms underlying them, to distill and refine it, and elevate it to a respected art form. From the start he structured the interweaving sections of his compositions as carefully as a Bach concerto.

By raising ragtime, the music of black people, to the level of an art, Joplin believed he could also raise the status of all African-Americans. From the vantage of a hundred years, it seems, perhaps, a naive dream, but it is the key to understanding this complex genius. It is, after all, what his life's obsession, Treemonisha, was all about.

His new opera told of a black baby girl found beneath a tree in Arkansas just after the Civil War, close to the place and time of Joplin's own birth. The infant's adoptive parents, Ned and Monisha, come to call her Treemonisha, and she grows up to lead their settlement of former slaves away from superstitions and ignorance, toward education and enlightenment. Echoes of Joplin's life and beliefs are hard to miss. He advocated self-advancement through education, the need for black leadership, and the power of music to transform lives. Moreover, certain biographical convergences cannot be coincidental; his beloved Freddie had most likely been born in September 1884, the very month teenage Treemonisha "starts upon her career as a teacher and leader."

New York seemed to stimulate Joplin. For a man "never caught smiling," as the publisher John Stark once said of him, Joplin's behavior was decidedly buoyant. He began pushing the limits of ragtime. His Euphonic Sounds of 1909 later inspired the giant of Harlem stride piano, James P. Johnson, to marvel that Joplin "was 50 years ahead of his time!" He mingled with the famous and not-so-famous of New York's vibrant black music scene. Increasingly, too, he enjoyed the company of Lottie Stokes.

In midtown Manhattan where Joplin first lived, close to Tin Pan Alley, the streetscapes he knew are all but gone. But up in Harlem, in the west 130s, where Joplin and Lottie later moved, you can still sense the exhilaration he must have felt to discover an oasis of black culture, where artists, writers, intellectuals, and social activists burst with talents and ambitions that matched his own. He would not live to see the full flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, nor, thankfully, would he witness the areas decades of decline. Today, three quarters of a century later, Harkms population still exudes----far more than those of Sedalia or St. Louis----a sense of being somewhere, going somewhere.

Amid all his other projects, Joplin kept his eyes fixed on Treemonisha. By the fall of 1910 he had finished the piano-vocal score, then began making the rounds of publishers. By May of the next year no offer had come, and Joplin published the opera himself. A rave review in American Musician and Art Journal must have made him feel that his life's dream was about to come true: Joplin, it said, "has created an entirely new phase of musical art and has produced a thoroughly American opera. . . Its production would prove an interesting and potent achievement."

Sadly, this would be the high point for Treemonisha in Joplin's lifetime. Over the next years backers would appear with big ideas for staging the opera, but all came to nothing, or almost nothing. Probably in the fall of 1911, Joplin hired a Harlem theater and a cast of singers. There was no scenery, lighting, costumes, nor orchestra, just the performers and Joplin accompanying them on a piano. Potential backers were supposed to be in the audience, but none came forward. Four years later black students from Harlem's Martin-Smith Music School performed the ballet number "Frolic of the Bears," from act 2. According to a notice in New York Age, "100 professional musicians" accompanied the student troupe. It was the only orchestral rendition of any part of Treemonisha its composer ever heard.

About this time Eubie Blake saw Joplin play Maple Leaf Rag in Washington, D.C. Sixty years later Blake told the Joplin biographer Peter Gannnond that Joplin "was dead but he was breathing. . . . He could hardly speak." His playing, Blake elaborated to the jazz historian AI Rose, was pathetic: "So pitiful. He was so far gone with the dog [syphilis] and he sounded like a little child trying to pick out a tune." Joplin's syphilis, which he could have been harboring for as long as 30 years, had entered its deadly tertiary phase.

Among the effects of tertiary syphilis are mental confusion; bouts of destructiveness; loss of motor control in the fingers; speech difficulties; and finally convulsions, paralysis, and death. As he declined, Joplin sent out notices of new works soon to appear: his Symphony NO.1, a musical comedy called If, a vaudeville show called The Syncopated Jamboree, a piano concerto, and new rags. None of these compositions are known to exist. Did they live only in Joplin's imagination? Or might he have destroyed them in a disease-induced rage or, in a fit of terrible anxiety, to prevent others from stealing them? He had been known to destroy other manuscripts.

If he were strolling today on Fifth Avenue near 135th Street, Joplin would see that much of the old streetscape has vanished, razed for public spirited projects like the expansions of Harlem Hospital and an elementary school, and a sprawling high-rise apartment complex called Lenox Terrace. The Lincoln Theater, where Joplin gave the one-and-only performance of Treemonisha, is gone. The Martin-Smith Music School, whose students put on his "Frolic of the Bears, " is no more. But a fine old six-story building at 133 west 138th Street, where he and Lottie lived, still stands, wearing its age well. Likely he would be gratified that many street signs now bear the names of distinguished black men. What might move Joplin even more, I think (if I have come to know the man at all, is the great number of black Americans here who have shown their nation and the world how much they could achieve.

The money Lottie earned from letting and managing rooms must have been their main source of income as Joplin declined. In late January 1917 she signed him into Bellevue Hospital for observation. A few days later doctors transferred him to a facility for mental patients on Wards Island, on the East River. There, on Sunday, April 1, 1917, Joplin died. His body lies with those of two other indigents in the paupers' section of St. Michael's Cemetery in Queens. Unmarked for more than half a century, Joplin's shared grave is now designated by a granite slab placed by ASCAP in 1974. It reads (with incorrect birth date):

Scott Joplin American Composer November 24, 1868-Aprill, 1917

Lottie lived on until 1953, always telling interviewers her husband "was a great man [who] wanted to free his people from poverty and ignorance and superstition, just like the heroine of his ragtime opera Treemonisha."

Fifty-five years after Joplin's death, Treemonisha made its premiere at Wolf Trap, outside Washington, D.C., and in the fall of 1975 the Houston Grand Opera brought it to Broadway to great acclaim. Joplin was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his contributions to American music. In June 1983 a postage stamp honored his memory.

When Joplin died, in 1917, his ragtime----the music that had effervesced out of the countercultures of black America----was about to be overwhelmed by the mass-production of commercialized; musically simpler ragtime songs from Tin Pan Alley, and by a national craze for another style of black music, to be known as jazz. But listen, today, to jazz or, for that matter, any popular commercial music, and you will hear, when you least expect it, the unmistakable sound of rag.

----------------

Edmund H. Harvey, Jr., a former New York editor now living in Rhode Island, is currently writing a novel in which Scott Joplin plays a major role.

Interest in Joplin and ragtime has waned since its revival reached a peak in the 1970s, making libraries and used-book outlets today's best bets for material. Also try the Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation, which operates a modest "Ragtime Store" at 321 S. Ohio Avenue, Sedalia, M065301 (866-218-6258; ragtime@scottjoplin.org). Two very different books are musts for beginning to understand Joplin: King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, by Edward A. Berlin (Oxford University Press, new edition l1955). This is the definitive biography by the most assiduous of Joplin scholars, a lucid writer and musicologist. To Berlin we owe important discoveries, such as Joplin's long-buried marriage to Freddie Alexander.

They All Played Ragtime, Rudi B1sh and Harriet Janis (originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1950). This warm. hearted classic contains some information we now know to be incorrect and some anecdotes by memorable characters with faulty memories, but for its evocation of a lost era, it's tops.

Other than a few heavily doctored piano rolls Joplin made when his skills had declined, no recordings by him exist. Nobody knows how he sounded at his best. Many fine players with different takes on Joplin have issued CDs. Check both the jazz and classical sections, as well as ragtime. Also don't miss the 1975 Houston Grand Opera Treemonisha, conducted by Gunther Schuller.-E.H.H.