Photo courtesy Texas Music Museum and the Institute of Texan Cultures (1868-1917) Birthplace: Linden, TX Genre: Ragtime Influenced: Irving Berlin, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, Taj Mahal Other Sites: The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation

"Maple Leaf Rag," published in 1899, was the first million-selling piece of sheet music ever, certainly the first written by a Texan. The catchy tune's creator, Scott Joplin, became "the king of ragtime" in the first years of the new century, turning out dozens of sophisticated rags and even a couple of operas and a ballet, all in the ragtime idiom.

Joplin was born in 1868 near Linden in northeast Texas, but grew up in Texarkana. The son of former slaves, Joplin learned to play the banjo by the age of seven. His mother worked as a maid in the household of a Texarkana attorney, and young Scott loved to improvise on the family's piano. Around 1880 Joplin began taking free music lessons from a German immigrant who was a tutor to lumberman R.W. Rodgers' children. By the end of that decade Joplin had left Texarkana and worked his way to St. Louis as an itinerant pianist, playing the newly popular "ragged time" music in saloons and brothels along the way. After entertaining the visitors to Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, home base for his Texas Medley Quartette, where he entered the local "College for Negroes" and studied piano and theory.

On a visit to Kansas City Joplin showed some of the pieces he had written to a publisher, who in 1899 brought out the "Maple Leaf Rag," (named after the Maple Leaf Club, where Joplin entertained back in Sedalia). That sheet music, which sold an astonishing 1 million copies, launched Joplin's national career. Many other great rags followed, including "The Entertainer," "Elite Syncopations," "The Easy Winners," "The Chrysanthemum," and "Magnetic Rag," before the ragtime craze was replaced by other forms of Tin Pan Alley pop. Between 1899 and 1916 Joplin also recorded many of his tunes on rolls for the reproducing pianos that were a mainstay of wealthier middle class parlors.

But Joplin was ambitious for his large-scale ragtime-influenced classical compositions, a ballet and two operas. Unable to find financial backing, Joplin paid for a full production of his opera Treemonisha, which flopped. Friends said that Joplin's death in 1917, officially due to advanced syphilis contracted in his wild youth, was brought on in part by the public's rejection of what he considered his best work. The titles of his great rags are familiar now because Joplin's music was rediscovered in the 1970s by such pianists as Joshua Rifkin and popularized on the soundtrack of The Sting, the classic film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as a pair of con men. In the mid-seventies Houston Grand Opera also revived Joplin's masterpiece, Treemonisha, in a spectacular production that was recorded and widely distributed. Joplin received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for that opera in 1976, and is credited with the first grand opera created by an African American.