When I first heard Scott Joplin’s “Bethena,” I was a college freshman and my friend Robert was playing it on the piano in a common room. The college’s century-old Steinway was appallingly out of tune, ...

(May 5, 1976) -- A special Pulitzer Prize was given posthumously Monday to America's "King of Ragtime," Scott Joplin for the music he composed throughout his career. The award to the Texarkana native ...

Scott Joplin was raised in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Texas. During the late 1880s, he traveled the American South as a musician and in 1893 he went to Chicago for the World's ...

In the post-Civil War era, the cruel breath of slavery and the aborted plan of Reconstruction still hung over the American South. But in the Joplin home, banjo and fiddle music filled the family’s ...

Scott Joplin was an early musician who transformed much of the landscape of popular music in the early 1900s. Though many details of his short life are uncertain, his impact on early American music is ...