Quote of the Day (John McWhorter, on Scott Joplin’s Brand of Ragtime)

“The elegant ragtime pieces Joplin wrote better than anyone else are as difficult to play as they are lovely to hear. This had kept them a minority taste among pianists even in their prime, and today they are even less accessible given that ever fewer people play the piano. For the amateur instrumentalist, the 20th century became the age of the guitar, and in a music history class of 23 I recently taught, not a single one of the students had ever played the piano. Moreover, Joplin’s rags are gorgeous but not ‘hot,’ and the rock sensibility dominant since the 1970s makes it hard for most to connect with music that has so little “swagger” as some might put it these days. Ragtime’s descendant, jazz, differs from it partly in having exactly that ‘jamming’ essence and thus reaches the modern ear more easily; ragtime sounds like juice and cookies in contrast. The ’70s were the tail end of the time when pop music was often couched in melody and harmony elaborate enough that, for example, one could render it on a piano (Chicago; Earth, Wind & Fire; Billy Joel). I highly suspect that if used on the soundtrack of a hit movie today, Joplin’s music, even though largely unheard today, would barely occasion notice beyond a few musicians and musicologists.”— John McWhorter, “The Rag Man,” The American Interest, Volume 12, Number 2, 2016

I suspect that there are many people like me who had never heard of Scott Joplin until Marvin Hamlisch used the "King of Ragtime’s" piece “The Entertainer” as the unforgettable background music to the 1973 Best Picture Oscar winner, “The Sting.” That soundtrack wasn’t the only reason why interest in the pianist-composer revived (Jeremy Rifkin’s musicological sleuthing and E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime played their role, too), but it did give provide irresistible momentum to that awareness. 

Joplin—believed to have been born 150 years ago today in Linden, Texas—could have used more of that attention in the last decade or so of his life. Fairly or not, he privately complained that Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was heavily indebted to his own work. Moreover, he was bitterly disappointed in the unsuccessful dream project of his last decade, Treemonisha, the first grand opera composed by an African American. 

He died in 1917 of syphilis, and was a wreck in the last couple of years before that. Jazz pianist Eubie Blake recalled seeing him taunted by other musicians to play: “So pitiful. He was so far gone with the dog (syphilis) and he sounded like a little child tryin' to pick out a tune."

It would take 50 years after his death for him to be noticed, he told friends. That turned out to be almost exactly on the mark, as recordings by Rifkin, Gunther Schuller, and the soundtrack for The Sting brought renewed recognition. Most remarkably, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1976 for Treemonisha.