Maple Leaf Rag

Scott Joplin walked into John Stark's music store in Sedalia, Missouri, sometime in 1899 and played a composition that would sell over a million copies of sheet music and make ragtime the dominant popular music in America for the next fifteen years. Stark, a white businessman with a better ear than most, offered Joplin a royalty deal instead of a flat buyout — one cent per copy sold — which was unusual for the era and extraordinary for a deal between a white publisher and a Black composer. Joplin accepted. That penny per copy eventually earned him more than most Black Americans of his generation would see in a lifetime.

Maple Leaf Rag is named after the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, where Joplin played regularly and where the Black community gathered to drink, dance, and hear the latest music. The composition is a four-strain rag of medium difficulty that manages to sound both intricate and effortless — a trick that requires the kind of craft most people mistake for talent. The left hand maintains a steady 'oom-pah' bass while the right hand plays syncopated melodies that pull against the beat in ways that anticipate jazz by two decades. Every subsequent rag — and there were thousands — was measured against this one.

Joplin was a serious man who wanted to be taken seriously. He studied at the George R. Smith College for Negroes in Sedalia. He composed a ballet. He wrote two operas. He believed ragtime was a legitimate art form worthy of the same respect given to European classical music, and he spent his career arguing this point to audiences that wanted to dance and critics who wanted to dismiss. 'Do not play this piece fast,' he wrote on the sheet music to Maple Leaf Rag. 'It is never right to play ragtime fast.' Pianists have been ignoring this instruction for over a century.

Joplin contracted syphilis at some point — the records are silent on when — and by 1916 he was in a Manhattan mental institution, his mind destroyed by the disease. He died on April 1, 1917, and was buried in a pauper's grave. His music disappeared for fifty years until a revival in the 1970s, fueled by the film The Sting, reintroduced Maple Leaf Rag to a world that had forgotten the man who wrote it. The penny-per-copy royalty had long since stopped mattering. The music, as usual, outlasted the money.

Recording: the Strolling Strings of the United States Air Force Band. Public domain (U.S. government work). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMaple_Leaf_Rag_-_Strolling_Strings_-_United_States_Air_Force_Band.mp3