Sedalia: Where Ragtime Found Its Voice

If you want to understand where American popular music came from, you should know about Sedalia, Missouri. In the eighteen nineties this railroad town of about ten thousand people was home to the man who invented ragtime, and what he wrote here changed music around the world.

Scott Joplin arrived in Sedalia around eighteen ninety-four. He was already a trained musician, but it was here that he enrolled at the George R. Smith College for Negroes, studying music theory and composition with serious attention to European classical forms. He performed at clubs along Main Street, including the Black quarter's Maple Leaf Club, named for a local fraternal organization.

In eighteen ninety-nine, Joplin walked into the office of music publisher John Stark and played him a new composition. Stark published Maple Leaf Rag on September first, eighteen ninety-nine, in a deal that gave Joplin a one-cent royalty per copy, which was unusual for a Black composer at the time. The piece was an immediate sensation. Accounts of its early sales differ. Some later biographers claimed tens of thousands of copies sold within months, but research based on the publisher's own records found far more modest early sales, with the rag's reputation as a best seller building gradually over the following years rather than overnight.

Ragtime, with its syncopated rhythms borrowed from African American folk music and its structured, European-influenced forms, was genuinely new. It was the first distinctly American popular musical genre to conquer the world, predating jazz, blues, and country as a commercial phenomenon.

Joplin left Sedalia not long after his success, eventually settling in New York where he composed his opera Treemonisha. He died in nineteen seventeen, mostly forgotten. He was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen seventy-six, fifty-nine years after his death, the year after a wave of renewed interest sparked by his music's use in the film The Sting.

Sedalia holds a Scott Joplin ragtime festival every June. The Maple Leaf Club site still stands downtown.