As Joplin's father had played the violin for plantation parties in North Carolina and his mother sang and played the banjo, Joplin was given a rudimentary musical education by his family, and from the age of seven he was allowed to play the piano while his mother cleaned. īy 1880, the Joplins moved to Texarkana, Arkansas, where Giles worked as a railroad laborer and Florence as a cleaner. There is disagreement over his exact place of birth in Texas, with Blesh identifying Texarkana, and Berlin showing the earliest record of Joplin being the June 1870 census which locates him in Linden, as a two-year-old. Berlin showed this was "almost certainly incorrect". His birth date was accepted by early biographers Rudi Blesh and James Haskins as November 24, 1868, although later biographer Edward A. Joplin was the second of six children born to Giles Joplin, a former slave from North Carolina, and Florence Givens, a freeborn African-American woman from Kentucky.
In 1916, Joplin descended into dementia as a result of neurosyphilis. His second opera, Treemonisha, was never fully staged during his life. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form that had made him famous but without much monetary success. In 1907, Joplin moved to New York City to find a producer for a new opera. The score to his first opera, A Guest of Honor, was confiscated in 1903 with his belongings for non-payment of bills and is now considered lost. Louis, where he continued to compose and publish and regularly performed in the community. It also brought Joplin a steady income for life, though he did not reach this level of success again and frequently had financial problems. This piece had a profound influence on writers of ragtime. He began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 brought him fame. There he taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894 and earned a living as a piano teacher. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897. During the late 1880s, he left his job as a railroad laborer and traveled the American South as an itinerant musician. While in Texarkana, Texas, he formed a vocal quartet and taught mandolin and guitar. Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Arkansas, and developed his own musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. Joplin considered ragtime to be a form of classical music and largely disdained the practice of ragtime such as that in honky tonk. One of his first and most popular pieces, the " Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag. During his brief career, he wrote over 100 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. Joplin is also known as the " King of Ragtime" because of the fame achieved for his ragtime compositions, music that was born out of the African-American community. Novem– April 1, 1917) was an African-American composer and pianist.