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Scott Joplin: The King of Ragtime


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             He enrolled in the George R. Smith College for Negroes, where he took advanced courses in harmony and composition to supplement his childhood training. Joplin traveled from one community to another throughout the Mississippi River Valley as a saloon and honky-tonk pianist, performing in clubs, dance halls, and saloons. By the time he landed in Sedalia, Missouri in 1894, Joplin had much musical experience behind him. .
             In Sedalia, the railroad center of a rich agricultural and cattle empire, African Americans had much freedom to direct their own lives. They could establish their own businesses and social institutions such as newspapers, bands, or churches. A major leisure-time activity for Sedalians both black and white, was music. Sedalia was a center of piano ragtime, which was played in the honkytonks, clubs, and bawdyhouses on east Main Street. .
             It was with ragtime that Joplin became a composer of note. He possessed a legato singing style and the ability to make ordinary chords and harmonies sound different. He had a talent at syncopation and the rendition of new ragtime forms. By the time he published his first rag in 1899, there were more than a hundred in print. However, he was on the scene as the style was being defined. .
             Ragtime can be described as an American musical genre mainly for piano. During its heyday it was transcribed for other instruments and published in orchestral form; but it was originally written as piano music, partly as being well suited to the instrument, and because the piano was the popular instrument of the day. Ragtime incorporated minstrel music, piano rolls, banjos, marching bands, bordellos, ballrooms, and clubs. .
             Ragtime was the Negro's music, but it was the white man who made it popular. Ragtime's roots are in cakewalks, minstrel-show plantation songs, black folk music, work songs, hollers, spirituals, blues, and the percussive rhythms of the banjo.


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