![]() ![]() Florence Givens Joplin was a freeborn black woman who worked as a laundress when not taking care of her children. Joplin's father, Giles, was a railroad laborer who was born into slavery and obtained his freedom five years before his son's birth. He was born November 24, 1868, in Texarkana, a small city straddling the border of Texas and Arkansas. ![]() ![]() Many of the details of Joplin's life, like much of his music, have been lost to history. Sadly, for all his accomplishments in putting a new musical form on the map, Joplin spent his final years madly obsessed with a fruitless crusade to enter, if not conquer, another arena: opera, the staid, classical venue accepted by a white community that had for so long ridiculed ragtime as cheap, vulgar, and facile black music. It was Joplin's short, hard-driving melodies-and the syncopated backbone he furnished them-that helped define the musical parameters of ragtime, a style that gave voice to the African-American experience during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. settled in Sedalia, MO, where he helped pioneer ragtime movement played cornet at World's Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893 published "Maple Leaf Rag," 1899 later composed longer pieces, including the 1911 opera Treemonisha.Īs Johann Strauss is to the waltz and John Philip Sousa is to the march, so is Scott Joplin to ragtime: its guru, chief champion, the figure most closely associated with its composition. Itinerant pianist, touring throughout U.S. Born November 24, 1868, in Texarkana, AR died April 1, 1917, in New York City son of Giles (a railroad laborer) and Florence (a laundress maiden name, Givens) Joplin married twice, to Belle Hayden and Lottie Stokes. ![]()
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