Review, Susan Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin

Columbia Missourian, November 20, 1994

The jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, one of the greatest musical innovators of the twentieth century, once heard an elderly ragtime pianist. After listening intently for a while, Mingus embraced the pianist and exclaimed, “Now I know where I came from.”

Ragtime served as the theme music for Americans as they made the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Its syncopation and invitation to dance “cakewalks” were incitements to cast off the staid self-restraints of Victorian culture. Its African-American origins signaled the increasing racial integration of American culture—ironically, at the same time that social interaction was becoming, in many areas, increasingly segregated. Finally, its fusion of African rhythms and European instrumentation inaugurated the breaking down of traditional distinctions between civilization and primitivism that would provide one of the motivating forces behind modernism.

In her biography of Scott Joplin, the self-proclaimed “king of ragtime,” Susan Curtis focuses on the ironies of white Americans’ enthusiasm for black culture. Joplin’s life symbolized the tenuous position of minority artists. Born in Texas during Reconstruction and the son of ex-slaves, Joplin achieved wealth and fame as the nation’s leading composer but died penniless and confined to a mental institution. Although his career coincided with Americans’ self-conscious search for an indigenous musical style, Joplin’s attempts to compose serious ragtime pieces, including ballets and operas, consistently were rejected in favor of shorter, popular tunes. Finally, Joplin’s efforts to use his art as a means of educating and uplifting African Americans were ignored by America’s black intelligentsia.

One of the major problems Curtis faces in reconstructing Joplin’s life is the absence of standard primary resource material. Joplin left few written records, and during many periods of his life he disappeared from historical view, such as the late 1880s and early 1890s when he toured the South as an itinerant musician. Curtis creatively overcomes this dilemma by describing the broader milieu in which Joplin lived and worked. She details black life in Reconstruction-era Texas, emphasizing the musical culture, to outline the social forces that produced Joplin. Similarly, she discusses the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where ragtime first gained national popularity, because it is claimed—though not proven—that Joplin was there.

In fact, Joplin did leave a large amount of primary material in the form of his music. But, as Curtis points out, “Of all the fields of culture, music is perhaps the most difficult to use as a historical source because the audial experience is so fleeting, and the meaning is so elusive.” Drawing on a wide variety of theorists of music and popular culture, Curtis shows how ragtime both reflected the dominant social changes of the late nineteenth century and commented on these transformations.

While living in Sedalia, Missouri, Joplin established his reputation as America’s leading ragtime composer with the 1899 publication of “Maple Leaf Rag.” The success of Joplin and the vibrant local black community that had sustained him briefly made Sedalia an important cultural center in the emergence of ragtime. But, as Curtis says, the growing popularity of ragtime had ironic side effects for Sedalia’s entertainment district. As the sheet music for such songs as “Maple Leaf Rag” became best-sellers, people no longer needed to go to clubs to hear the music, but could play it on their own parlor pianos. Similarly, the popularity of the Sedalia style led the city’s talents to leave for bigger more lucrative markets. Joplin himself left for St. Louis in 1900.

Until his death in 1917, Joplin lived in St. Louis and New York, working unceasingly to expand the boundaries of ragtime. But while white Americans eagerly listened to ragtime as popular entertainment, they rejected any attempt to present the music as serious art. For instance, Joplin’s longtime publisher, John Starks, refused to print his longer works and Joplin failed to find enough financial support to stage his opera, “A Guest of Honor.”

Many African Americans also increasingly rejected Joplin’s music. As Curtis argues, black intellectuals were engaged in an intense debate during the early twentieth century over the best strategy to pursue. Many, influenced by Booker T. Washington, emphasized education and racial uplift, while others, following W.E.B. DuBois, urged blacks to focus on integration and political empowerment. Most of the leading black figures in Harlem during this period fell into the second camp. Thus, when Joplin, then living in Harlem, composed his opera “Treemonisha,” a story of life on a Southern plantation in which the heroine leads her people out of ignorance by teaching them to read, it was greeted with silence on the part of Harlem intellectuals. Highly educated and cosmopolitan in outlook, they could not relate to Joplin’s portrait of poor, ignorant, superstitious sharecroppers.

The tragedy of Joplin’s later career symbolizes the difficulties black artists traditionally have encountered in American society. Although whites frequently are fascinated by black culture, they typically have allowed blacks success only in rigidly-defined, stereotypical roles. Curtis’s fine biography makes clear the hazards minority artists face when they are not satisfied with such roles.