I must have been 7 or 8 when I first heard Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" in the movie The Sting. This would have been at the historic Castro Theater in San Francisco, where my mom used to take us for double matinees of old movies on weekday afternoons. We called this "homeschooling."
Like pretty much every other piano student in America, I set about learning how to play "The Entertainer." Everyone was playing it. The sound of that piece, performed hesitantly and unevenly, with stumbles over the tricky parts, is burned into my memory. My friend Helga can still sing the tune with the fingering her piano teacher assigned: 1-2, 1-5, 1-5, 1-5, 2-3-4-5-2-3-4-1-3-2. And the tinkling version of the song from the ice cream truck in my neighborhood further drilled the song into my head, signaling the sound of summer.
Joplin wrote "The Entertainer" in 1902, at the dawn of a new century. That year, President Theodore Roosevelt rode through the streets of Hartford, Conn., in an electric automobile, the first movie theater opened in Los Angeles, and J.C. Penney launched his first store in Kemmerer, Wyo. Writers John Steinbeck and Arna Bontemps, composer Richard Rodgers, and the photographer Ansel Adams were all born in 1902, destined to define a new artistic era.
Leaving his own indelible mark on the 20th century, Joplin was an innovator whose deceptive, irregular rhythms and nuanced harmonic language helped define the trajectory of American music during a time of rapid change and flux. His short life (he died before age 50 in 1917) is almost a case study in the transformations of his time. He was born in northeast Texas just four years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the first Black Americans born into the promise of freedom. A natural-born musician, Joplin absorbed a wide mix of influences, from the plantation melodies his parents played on the violin and banjo to the classical training he received from a generous local piano teacher. By the time Joplin was in his teens, in the 1880s, he was making a living as an itinerant musician, shaping a brand new American sound.
Joplin became the "King of Ragtime," a pioneer of a genre that permanently altered American culture. It exploded onto the scene in 1893, thanks in part to the World's Columbian Exposition, an expansive fair in Chicago visited by some 27 million people. While the fair itself was segregated, the saloons, cafés and brothels surrounding the fairgrounds resonated with the melodies of traveling ragtime musicians, including Joplin, who was there with his own band. The St. Louis Dispatch described this new national craze as "a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city-bred people."