Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag: A Genre Named in Sedalia

Scott Joplin had been working the Midwestern honky-tonk circuit for years before he settled in Sedalia, Missouri in the late eighteen nineties. He played at the Maple Leaf Club on Main Street and at the Black Four Hundred Club, absorbing and refining the syncopated style he had been developing since his Texas childhood. In Sedalia, he found a publisher willing to commit to the music. A man named John Stark ran a small music store and agreed in eighteen ninety-nine to publish a composition Joplin called Maple Leaf Rag.

The piece was unlike anything that had appeared in published sheet music. The left hand carried a regular march pattern in the bass while the right hand played a melody that consistently arrived slightly ahead of or behind the beat, creating the syncopated pull that would define ragtime. It was formally constructed, carefully notated, and built to last. Stark and Joplin agreed to a royalty arrangement unusual for a Black composer at that time.

The sheet music sold widely. Claims of one million copies sold in Joplin's lifetime, which appear in many accounts, are disputed by some scholars, who put the actual figures considerably lower during his lifetime. What is not disputed is that Maple Leaf Rag was the most influential single piece of ragtime music ever published, that it defined the genre for the world, and that Joplin's name on the cover gave future Black composers evidence that a Black man could be the named, credited architect of an American musical form.

The Maple Leaf Club where Joplin played in Sedalia is gone. The music it generated is on every playlist that includes ragtime.