![]() ![]() At first, Giles Joplin was concerned that music would sidetrack his son from a solid, wage-earning trade, but he soon saw the clear inventive genius in Scott, who, by the time he was 11, was playing and improvising with unbelievable smoothness. Scott, whose first foray into the world of scales and half notes came on the guitar, discovered a richer lyrical agent in his neighbor's piano. Like many in the black community, the Joplins saw in music a rewarding tool of expression, and the talented family was sought out to perform at weddings, funerals, and parties. Florence Givens Joplin was a freeborn black woman who worked as a laundress and cared for 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. Scott Joplin personified ragtime he was its chief champion, the figure most closely associated with its composition. ![]()
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