"Maple Leaf Rag"

Scott Joplin

Readers of our little weekly songfest at Word & Song know that Sometimes a Song is coordinated with our Word of the Week. That’s so this week, I guess, because it’s hard not to think of maple leaves here in Canada, and bright red ones, too. The red maple is perhaps the most prolific tree species in North America, and the flag of Canada features that brilliant leaf that we all love so much in autumn.

I’ll confess that I’ve always assumed that the “Maple Leaf Rag” had to be connected in some way to Canada. Ha! I was wrong about that. “The Maple Leaf” was the name of a night club in Sedalia, Missouri, where today’s composer worked as a piano player early in his career and where an annual Scott Joplin Festival is held in his honor to this day. Joplin was born shortly after the end of the Civil war, likely on the farm where his father still worked — by then as a free man — for his former owner. When Scott was a small child, his family moved to a new border town called Texarkana, where he had access to a piano and — fortunately for us all — where he was taught by an excellent piano teacher, a German immigrant named Julius Weiss. Weiss introduced Scott to classical music in general and to the opera, in particular. That Scott Joplin was so fortunate in his music teacher is amazing, given the times and the general impoverishment of his family. Joplin’s early training in classical piano gave him an edge in the development and popularization of ragtime music — which was “in the air” when he was a young man at the turn of the 20th century. Weiss had inspired in his pupil a desire to become a concert pianist, a goal he was not destined to reach.

But while it was not possible for Scott Joplin to fulfil that youthful dream, there is no doubt that Weiss’s tutelage well prepared him to become the best-known influence on and composer of the genuinely astouding American form of musical art known as ragtime. Just as the old century turned to a new one, our song for this week became the best-selling work in the genre — not overnight, but over time. It provided Scott Joplin a modest but steady income for the rest of his life. And like many of our readers, I first heard of Scott Joplin’s music through the soundtrack of “The Sting” (1973), which shot to the top of the charts as adapted by Marvin Hamlish for the film and which featured Joplin’s rag, “The Entertainer” as well as many of his other ragtime works.

I hope to write more about Scott Joplin and his amazing musical achievemnts again, but for today I will close with the jaunty and excellent “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Here is a version from the piano roll collection produced by Joplin himself at the ivories.

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