Scott Joplin is one of the legends of the piano canon – every aspiring pianist under the sun has banged away at ‘The Entertainer’. But how much do you know about the King of Ragtime? You only need to ...

Friday is the anniversary of Scott Joplin’s death in 1917. The story of this Black master of the ragtime genre can seem like one that never got far beyond the starting gate and ended with a sad ...

As radical as rock & roll was when it first emerged in America, ragtime seemed childish to many at first, a fad that would fade quickly. Others found it threatening, and quirte possibly dangerous. To ...

When Richard Dowling was 9, the movie “The Sting” came out, with the famous Marvin Hamlisch soundtrack that included six ragtime songs composed by Scott Joplin. “I literally fell in love with ‘The ...

Toe-tapping and head-bobbing are inevitable when listening to the "King of Ragtime’s" songs. They’re so compelling and familiar that one is even a famous ice cream truck jingle. But the music that ...

Scott Joplin personified ragtime; he was its chief champion, the figure most closely associated with its composition. It was Joplin's short, hard-driving melodies- -and the syncopated backbone he ...

Scott Joplin was once among America's most popular songwriters. The son of a former slave, the composer's Ragtime music swept the nation more than 100 years ago. Joplin's house in St. Louis is thought ...

In the post-Civil War era, the cruel breath of slavery and the aborted plan of Reconstruction still hung over the American South. But in the Joplin home, banjo and fiddle music filled the family’s ...

In the early 1880s, a young African American boy in Texarkana named Scott Joplin was trained in the fundamentals of classical music and opera by his German-born teacher. Born near Linden, Joplin was ...

When Scott Joplin’s father left the North Carolina plantation where he had been born a slave, there was one thing he wanted to hold on to: the echoes of the Negro spirituals he had heard in the fields ...