Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin was born in Texas. Little is known about his early years. There is no precise information about the date of his birth, for example, although he is generally thought to have come into the world in the first half of 1868. In his early years, his mother worked as a maid for a white family known as the Cooks, and Mrs. Cook seems to have given Scott permission to play on her piano while his mother, Florence, was cleaning the house. Ah, what Mrs. Cook was starting! Joplin may have been the first musician ever to sell more than a million copies of a piece of instrumental music, with the commercial success of his Maple Leaf Rag in the 1890s. He is also the composer and librettist of an opera, Treemonisha, published at Joplin’s own expense in 1910 and produced by the music department of Morehouse College and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in January 1972, more than half a century after the composer’s death.