Scott Joplin granted copyright for his "Maple Leaf Rag" - September 18th, 1899

On this day in 1899, musician Scott Joplin was granted the copyright for a song he wrote called the “Maple Leaf Rag.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that strives to know at least a little
bit more history every day. I'm Gabeluzier, and today we're
celebrating the life and work of ragtime pianist Scott Joplin.

(00:32):
The day was September eighteen. Musicians Scott Joplin was granted
the copyright for a song he wrote called the Maple
Leaf Rag. It quickly became one of the most famous
and influential pieces of the ragtime era, and a steady
source of income for Joplin for the rest of his life.

(00:55):
More than five hundred thousand copies of the sheet music
were sold in just the first ten years after its publication.
Joplin earned a one cent royalty on each of those sales,
or about five thousand dollars over the course of a decade.
That may not sound like much, but adjusting for inflation,

(01:15):
it's the equivalent of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars today.
If nothing else, the annual income from that one song
would have been enough to cover Joplin's yearly living expenses,
so not a bad deal. In fact, when you crunch
the numbers, it's impressive. How good a deal Joplin was
able to negotiate with his publisher, a man named John Stark.

(01:38):
At the time and even today, in some cases, most
composers make money from their performances, not from their compositions.
Joplin's arrangement was unusual in that sense, and even more
so since he was a black musician working in the
Jim Crow South. The deal he made with Stark shows

(01:58):
that both men knew the song would be a hit,
and in fact, Joplin said as much himself before it
was even published. He told a friend, quote, the maple
Leaf will make me the king of ragtime composers, And yeah,
he called it. The maple Leaf Rag was a monster success.

(02:19):
It launched a ragtime craze across the country. Suddenly, composers
were churning out hundreds of rags that imitated its sound,
eager to capture even a fraction of Joplin's success. To
be clear, though Joplin didn't invent ragtime. There were plenty
of other composers writing that style of music in the

(02:40):
eighteen nineties, but Joplin brought a level of imagination and
complexity to his rags that was new for the genre.
Ragtime music grew out of minstrel shows and was characterized
by its syncopated or offbeat ragged rhythms in the late
nineteenth and early twenty cent reas. You could hear it

(03:01):
being played by black musicians throughout the Midwest, but it
wasn't taken seriously anywhere else. Joplin was convinced that ragtime
could have wider appeal if treated more thoughtfully, and the
maple Leaf rag was his proof of concept. It was
also the product of his life experience up to that point,

(03:22):
both on the stage and off. Joplin was born near Marshall, Texas,
probably in eighteen sixty seven or so. He and his
parents lived a difficult life there, but since his father
played violin and his mother the banjo, their house was
always full of music. Eventually, the Joplin's moved to Texarkana,

(03:43):
where Scott's mother found work cleaning houses. It's believed he
played the piano for the first time at the home
of one of her employers. In time, the young boy's
talent drew the attention of a German music teacher named
Julian Weiss, who began teaching him piano playing and composition.
As a teenager, Joplin formed the Texas Medley Quartet and

(04:07):
started performing at dances, weddings, and other events. He later
traveled to Missouri, where he taught music and played the
piano in local bars and restaurants. Eventually, his friends convinced
him to study music at George R. Smith College in Sedalia, Missouri.
It was here that Joplin set to work on adapting

(04:27):
the tricky, syncopated rhythms of popular rag into formal musical notation.
In the meantime, he continued performing at local venues, including
a short lived social club called the Maple Leaf. While
never confirmed its believed Joplin named his most famous composition
as a tribute to the club where he first performed

(04:49):
the piece. After taking ragtime mainstream with The Maple Leaf,
Joplin struggled to repeat his early success. He wrote more
than forty other rags in his life time, including the
now classic piece The Entertainer, as well as dozens of
other piano songs and two operas, but none of them
were hits. In nineteen seventeen, Joplin passed away from paralytic dementia.

(05:15):
Complication of syphilis. He was forty nine. According to his
loved ones, Joplin often said that he would never be
appreciated until after he was dead. The composer was ultimately
proven right, but it did take some time. Most of
the world moved on from ragtime in the nineteen twenties,

(05:35):
is other new styles of music made their debut, but
the Maple Leaf Rag and some of Joplin's other songs
showed surprising resilience despite the changing times. By the early
nineteen seventies, renewed interest had set the stage for a
ragtime revival. Pianists who had rediscovered Joplin's work started adding

(05:56):
songs like The Entertainer and the Maple Leaf Rag to
their set list. A new recording of Joplin's catalog sold
over a million copies, and in nineteen seventy three his
music gained a new life as the soundtrack for the
classic movie The Sting starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
Although he didn't get to enjoy the full fruits of

(06:17):
his labor, Joplin's prophecy about posthumous appreciation was fulfilled in
nineteen seventy six, when he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize
for his contributions to American music. At long last, Ragtime
was being taken seriously, just as Joplin had always wanted.

(06:38):
I'm gay, Bluesier, and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday, And if
you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to send
them to me at this day at i heart media
dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here

(06:59):
again tomorrow for another day in History class. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
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