Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, ragtime or “rags,” was the new American music genre influenced by the blues. Ragtime music was extremely different than anything else that was being played at the time and it was not viewed as proper music, so it was played in saloons and bars. To play rags, a pianist had to be remarkably skilled because they have to be able to keep up with their own rhythm and play every piece of the song until the 1920s, when big bands came in. Scott Joplin, “the King of Ragtime,” created this new music form, which had blues in it, but it was separate from blues. Scott Joplin was born November 24, 1868 in northeastern Texas and by the 1870s his family moved Texarkana, Texas, where his father worked as a laborer and his mother as a house cleaner and laundress (Trout). His mother washed clothes in order to pay for Joplin’s piano lessons, but when she …show more content…
As a teenager, Scott left home to play music at bordellos and eventually he ended up in Sedalia, Missouri in 1889, at a bar called Maple Leaf, where he created the, “Maple Leaf Rag.” He later travelled to a piano playing competition in Missouri, in hopes of getting his song published. Joplin went with a friend, Henry Jackson, who became his early partner. Jackson won, but since he won with Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” and John Stark Publishing paid him $50 with 10% royalties and demonstrating. His music was so different that no one knew how to describe it and early on it was associated with the colored community, which made it difficult for mainstream artists to accept it, but John Philip Sousa, regarded as the greatest American composer at the time, backed Scott Joplin. Sousa said that Joplin’s music, “will live as long as music is