Wall Street Rag

Joplin subtitled the four sections of Wall Street Rag with a narrative: 'Panic in Wall Street, Brokers Feeling Melancholy,' 'Good Times Coming,' 'Good Times Have Come,' and 'Picking Up Bountifully.' It's a miniature tone poem about the Panic of 1907, when a stock market crash nearly destroyed the American financial system and was only averted by J.P. Morgan personally strong-arming the country's bankers into pooling their resources. A Black ragtime composer in Missouri wrote a musical commentary on the machinations of Wall Street financiers. The range of this man's interests was staggering.

The opening strain is deliberately chaotic — crashing chords, dissonant clusters, rhythmic instability that conveys panic with a specificity that most program music doesn't attempt. It's Joplin at his most avant-garde, using techniques that wouldn't become standard in popular piano music for another twenty years. The second strain calms down, the harmony resolves, and by the fourth strain the piano is practically dancing. Recovery, in Joplin's telling, is a party. He had experience with financial hardship and recovery. He knew both sides.

Wall Street Rag is evidence that Joplin read newspapers, followed economic events, and thought about the world beyond the ragtime circuit. His image as a simple piano player was always a reduction imposed by critics who couldn't reconcile technical sophistication with Black authorship. Joplin was educated, ambitious, literate, and aware. He wrote an opera about the uplift of Black Americans through education. He wrote a rag about financial panic. The man was paying attention.

The piece sold modestly. Its programmatic ambition probably confused audiences who wanted something to dance to, not a musical editorial about monetary policy. But Wall Street Rag expanded the boundaries of what ragtime could discuss, and it did so with a confidence that says more about Joplin's self-image than any interview could. He saw himself not as a dance-music provider but as a composer. Full stop. The kind who comments on history while it happens.

Recording: the Zon-O-Phone Concert Orchestra, Record: Zon 5603, Recorded in February 1910. Public domain (US sound recording published 1910). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWall_Street_Rag_-Scott_Joplin%2C_Zonophone_Concert_Orchestra_1910.oga