Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin Famous Composer

Scott Joplin was the best black composer you could ever find and everyone loved his concerts. Joplin was born November 24, 1868 and died April 1, 1917. He grew up near Linden, Texas with his mother, father, and five other brother and sisters. After 1871 the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Texas and that is where he learns to play the piano. Joplin got free piano lessons from a German music teacher. Joplin left home and joined various musical groups and traveled around the mid-west to sing. In 1895, Joplin was in Syracuse, New York, selling two songs, Please Say You Will and A Picture of Her Face. Sadly Joplin's death did not make the headlines for two reasons: ragtime was quickly losing ground to jazz and the United States would enter World War I within days. Joplin was buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in the Astoria section of Queens. Joplin wrote 59 great pieces that everyone loved. In honor of Scott Joplin the have a festival for him in Sedalia, Missouri were he lived for a few years. In the 1880s, the teenage Joplin lived for a while in Sedalia and attended Lincoln High School in the black neighborhood north of the railroad. Joplin moved, in 1901, to St. Louis with his new wife, Belle. In the summer of 1907 Joplin went to New York to make contacts with new publishers and to find financial backing for Treemonisha, an opera he had been working on for the past few years.

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