Scott Joplin is generally regarded as the king, or pioneer, of ragtime music. He devoted his life's work to creating a true art from materials of folk inspiration, and died believing he had failed in that endeavor. Joplin was raised in a musical family, his father played the violin and his mother, the banjo. He demonstrated talent at the piano as a child, and his father scraped by to buy a small one. In 1885, Joplin arrived at St. Louis and got a job playing in the Silver Dollar saloon. Over the next ten years, Joplin played in St. Louis and other local towns. Oral histories place him at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where he tried out some of his innovative and daring arrangements.

In 1896 Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, where he played piano at the Maple Leaf Club, took advanced courses in harmony and composition at the George Smith College for Negroes, and worked diligently at his compositions. He was first able to find a publisher for one of his syncopated pieces, Original Rags, in 1899. Later that year another publisher, John Stark, bought one of the rags he played at the Maple Leaf Club. That piece, Maple Leaf Rag, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first decade of publication, and became perhaps the most influential composition in ragtime history. Stark continued to publish Joplin works--Peacherine Rag (1901), Augustan Club Waltz (1901), A Breeze from Alabama (1902), Elite Syncopations (1902), The Entertainer (1902), and The Strenuous Life (1902). In 1903, Joplin composed The Rag-Time Dance, a folk ballet.

Joplin spent the last decade of his life in New York, where he worked on his second ragtime opera, Treemonisha, published more than 20 compositions, gave private music lessons, and performed in vaudeville. In 1911, Joplin finished Treemonisha, and began to search for financial backers. The opera's main theme was the importance of education in the African American community and Joplin was unable to attract a financier. He published the score at his own expense in 1911, and produced a concert version in order to attract a backer. He succeeded in putting the opera on stage in Harlem for one night—without costumes, scenery, lighting, or orchestra. Joplin played the orchestral parts at the piano. Critics ignored Treemonisha and Joplin was devastated by its failure. Joplin's health deteriorated soon afterward. He died in 1917⁶⁸.

Joplin's legacy cannot be overestimated; his work was the focus of "rediscover" among jazz enthusiasts, scholars, and critics in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1972 Treemonisha was given its second world premier at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center. He is regarded as the incontrovertible genius of ragtime, creating a genre of music that is marked by three to five themes in sixteen-bar strains. Complicated, varied, invariably falling into repeats, and usually opening with a bright and memorable strain, it became known as ragtime, the genre that made possible the renaissance of black musical theater, the blues, and jazz⁶⁹.