We miss out on an awful lot of things after we die. To some anti-social people, I suppose that’s welcome news. But to control freaks who like to organize every minute of their life, not being ...

The new Brad Pitt movie about the backward aging of Benjamin Button features one of Scott Joplin's lesser-known rags, "Bethena." As Joplin famously noted of all his compositions, "It is never right to ...

No one would argue that Scott Joplin’s opera “Treemonisha” packs the dramatic punch of an opera byVerdi, who truly understood theater. The plot about former slaves who run a plantation abandoned by ...

Although his work has received attention since his death in 1916, the full scope of Scott Joplin's genius has not been revealed. His enormous popularity as a Ragtime king from the 1890's through the ...

There was a time when pianist Tom McDermott downplayed his affinity for ragtime composer Scott Joplin. For years, ragtime suffered from an image problem, a hokey stereotype of straw hats and Shakey’s ...

A pulsating piano solo by a black composer published 125 years ago this fall became an unexpected bestseller, drew droves of young people to the piano, and became an enduring classic of American music ...

When Richard Dowling was 9, the movie “The Sting” came out, with the famous Marvin Hamlisch soundtrack that included six ragtime songs composed by Scott Joplin. “I literally fell in love with ‘The ...

Ninety-five years ago to the date of this posting—April 1, 1917—a patient died in the Manhattan State Hospital. A wasted shell of a once-great talent, he was adrift in the limbo of a dementia caused ...

Before his death in 1917, composer Scott Joplin said: “Boy, when I’m dead 25 years, people are going to begin to recognize me.” He was spot on. The first of many revivals of his music occurred in the ...