You know “The Entertainer.” Even if the title means nothing to you, the first few notes probably will.

That jaunty piano melody has become musical shorthand for straw hats, old-time saloons, silent movies, elaborate confidence schemes, and anything else that seems as if it ought to involve a handlebar mustache. Millions of people know it from the 1973 movie The Sting, where it accompanies Paul Newman and Robert Redford through an intricately constructed con game set in Depression-era Chicago.

There is only one small historical problem with that.

Scott Joplin wrote “The Entertainer” in 1902, more than three decades before the events portrayed in The Sting. By 1936, when the movie takes place, ragtime’s glory days were already well in the rearview mirror. Director George Roy Hill knew this perfectly well. He used Joplin’s music anyway because it sounded right, which may be one of the most successful examples in movie history of responding to historical accuracy with, “Yes, but have you heard the song?”

The story becomes even stranger when you look at the man who wrote it. Scott Joplin was not merely a piano player turning out catchy tunes. He regarded ragtime as serious music, wrote a ballet and two operas, complained that other musicians were playing his compositions incorrectly, composed a piece about two locomotives deliberately smashing into each other, and spent much of his career trying to convince the musical establishment that he belonged in the company of serious composers.

Then, more than half a century after his death, Hollywood finally made him a pop star.

Scott Joplin Was Born Into a World That Left Poor Records

We should begin with an unusually appropriate complication: we do not know exactly when Scott Joplin was born. Older biographies commonly give November 24, 1868, but later research places his birth sometime between the summer of 1867 and mid-January 1868 in northeast Texas.

His parents, Giles and Florence Joplin, raised their family around Texarkana. Giles had been enslaved before the Civil War and worked as a laborer; Florence supported the family in part through domestic work. Scott demonstrated musical ability while still a child, experimenting with available pianos and eventually attracting the attention of a German-born music teacher named Julius Weiss.

Weiss may be one of the most important almost-forgotten characters in American musical history. According to the Handbook of Texas, he taught the young Joplin piano, ear training, harmony, sight reading, classical music, and especially opera. He probably also helped the family obtain a used square piano.

The relationship apparently mattered to Joplin long after the lessons ended. His widow later recalled that when Joplin became successful, he sent money to his former teacher after Weiss had fallen on difficult times. There is something satisfyingly circular about that: the teacher who gave an impoverished boy access to a larger musical world was later helped by the student whose music had escaped far beyond Texarkana.

His teacher’s influence also helps explain something about Joplin that is easy to miss when we hear “The Entertainer” tinkling merrily in the background. His training with Weiss exposed him to European classical music, harmony, formal composition, and especially opera. Joplin therefore received a musical education that reached far beyond the dance halls and clubs where ragtime flourished.

That mattered because Joplin did not think of himself merely as a writer of catchy piano pieces. He wanted to create serious American music that could stand alongside the European tradition while drawing on African American musical forms. Ragtime was part of that ambition, not a detour from it, and his later efforts to write larger stage works and operas make much more sense when you remember the classical education Weiss had given him as a boy.

America had been producing serious composers long before Joplin — we previously met one particularly unexpected example in Francis Hopkinson, the Founding Father who also composed music — but Joplin was helping create something unmistakably American by bringing European forms into conversation with African American musical traditions.

Ragtime Was Not Supposed to Be Played Like the Piano Was on Fire

Ragtime gets its distinctive sound from syncopation: the melody accents unexpected beats while the left hand generally maintains a steadier rhythmic foundation. The result produces that wonderfully lopsided, forward-moving quality that sounds as though the music is perpetually arriving half a second earlier than its appointment.

Modern performers sometimes treat ragtime as an athletic event. The goal appears to be playing as many notes as possible before either the pianist or the piano requires medical attention.

Scott Joplin objected.

Quite strongly, in fact. In his 1908 instructional work School of Ragtime, Joplin complained about music masquerading as proper ragtime and insisted that performers carefully observe the written notation. His most famous instruction was wonderfully direct: “Never play ragtime fast at any time.”

The Library of Congress notes that Joplin believed careless performance could destroy the intended effect of his music. Even on the original score of “The Entertainer,” he placed the instruction “Not fast” at the beginning.

Apparently Joplin had met pianists before.

“Maple Leaf Rag” Changes Everything

Joplin spent part of the 1890s in Sedalia, Missouri, performing, teaching, and studying music. There he became associated with the Maple Leaf Club and eventually produced the composition that established his reputation: “Maple Leaf Rag.”

In August 1899, Joplin signed an agreement with music publisher John Stark to publish the piece. The surviving publishing agreement is now held by the Morgan Library & Museum. Joplin received no advance, but he did receive something much more valuable in the long run: a royalty of one cent for every copy sold.

At first, this looked considerably less impressive than it sounds. Only about 400 copies sold during the first year, earning Joplin approximately $4. Sales steadily accelerated, however, and publisher John Stark’s records indicate that roughly half a million copies had been sold by 1909. That would have put about $5,000 in royalties into Joplin’s pocket by that point, with the piece continuing to provide him income for the rest of his life. In 1909 alone, his royalties from “Maple Leaf Rag” have been estimated at about $600 — a respectable annual income from one composition at a time when the royalty on each copy was literally a penny.

“Maple Leaf Rag” became the defining composition of classic ragtime. Publishers began advertising him as the “King of Ragtime Writers,” a title sufficiently grand that it sounds as though it ought to have come with robes, a crown, and authority to sentence careless pianists to six months of metronome practice.

The success allowed Joplin to perform less and devote more time to teaching and composing. In 1901 he moved to St. Louis, where he rented a modest flat at 2658A Morgan Street, now Delmar Boulevard.

That apartment still exists. It is now the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site.

And it was during this remarkably productive St. Louis period that Joplin wrote “The Entertainer.”

The Real Story Behind “The Entertainer”

This is where anyone hoping for a dramatic creation story must prepare for mild disappointment. There is no reliable account of Joplin suddenly awakening at 3:00 a.m., shouting “I have it!” and sprinting to the piano while frightened neighbors summoned the authorities.

What we know is both simpler and, in some ways, more interesting. Joplin wrote “The Entertainer” in 1902 while living in St. Louis, during the same highly productive period that gave us “Elite Syncopations,” “March Majestic,” and other works. John Stark published it as “The Entertainer: A Rag Time Two Step.” The original 1902 sheet music survives in the Library of Congress.

Right at the top of that music is a tantalizing dedication: “Dedicated to James Brown and His Mandolin Club.”

And this is where history behaves exactly as history usually does when it notices that we have become interested in something. It stops explaining itself.

We know surprisingly little about James Brown or precisely why Joplin dedicated the composition to his mandolin club. There is no surviving letter in which Joplin helpfully says, “Dear future historians, here is the entire story behind my new composition, including several amusing anecdotes suitable for websites approximately 125 years from now.”

But the mandolin connection is significant. America was experiencing something of a mandolin craze around the turn of the twentieth century. Clubs and ensembles flourished across the country, and the Library of Congress notes that portions of “The Entertainer” can be heard as evoking the quick plucking and tremolo effects associated with the instrument.

Publisher John Stark even issued an arrangement of “The Entertainer” for two mandolins and guitar.

Then history supplied a lovely little epilogue.

The First Recording of “The Entertainer” Wasn’t Even a Piano Recording

Scott Joplin lived well into the age of recorded sound, but no conventional audio recording of him performing is known to survive. He did make several player-piano rolls late in life, but these were mechanically processed and cannot simply be treated as the equivalent of putting a microphone in front of Joplin and pressing Record.

That absence is particularly frustrating because recorded sound itself was no longer a novelty. Thomas Edison had demonstrated the phonograph back in 1877, a story involving significantly more shouting and neck-related experimentation than one might expect from the birth of the recording industry, as we explored in the strange story of the first phonograph demonstration.

Joplin died in 1917 without leaving us an ordinary recording of how he personally wanted “The Entertainer” to sound.

The first known commercial recording based on “The Entertainer” finally arrived in 1928, eleven years after Joplin’s death. According to PBS, African American musicians Matthew Prater and Nap Hayes recorded a mandolin-and-guitar adaptation of the piece under the title “Easy Winner.” The recording also incorporated other musical material rather than simply reproducing Joplin’s composition note for note. You can listen to the surviving 1928 recording here.

Prater played mandolin. Hayes played guitar.

So the first recording of Joplin’s most famous piano rag returned, quite unexpectedly, to the very instruments suggested by the mysterious dedication on its original sheet music more than a quarter-century earlier.

Sometimes history actually ties up a loose end. We should appreciate these occasions because it does not like to make a habit of it.

Scott Joplin Also Composed Music About an Intentional Train Wreck

While we are collecting Scott Joplin facts, it would be irresponsible not to mention the time he composed music inspired by two locomotives being deliberately driven into one another.

On September 15, 1896, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad staged one of the more magnificently ill-considered publicity events of the nineteenth century. Railroad official William George Crush arranged for two obsolete steam locomotives to race toward each other and collide head-on near Waco, Texas.

More than 40,000 spectators arrived to watch.

The locomotives hit, both boilers exploded, debris flew into the crowd, three spectators were killed, and several others were seriously injured. According to the Handbook of Texas, the railroad fired Crush that evening and rehired him the following day, which is perhaps the most nineteenth-century performance review imaginable.

Joplin commemorated the spectacle in a composition called “Great Crush Collision March.” Musical passages depict the approaching trains, their whistles, and the collision.

So, yes, Scott Joplin essentially wrote disaster-movie music decades before disaster movies existed.

Joplin Wanted More Than Ragtime Fame

For all his success with pieces such as “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer,” Joplin increasingly wanted recognition for larger and more serious compositions. The ambition probably owed something to those childhood lessons from Julius Weiss and his early exposure to European opera.

One of Joplin’s most tantalizing works was an opera called A Guest of Honor. Its subject was President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1901 White House dinner with educator Booker T. Washington, an event that generated an enormous racial and political controversy.

Joplin formed a company and took the opera on tour in 1903. Financial trouble brought the production to an abrupt end, and the score disappeared. The Library of Congress considers it lost.

That means an entire Scott Joplin opera, written in response to one of the major racial controversies of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, existed, was performed, and then vanished.

Joplin’s greatest operatic ambition was Treemonisha, a work in which he attempted to combine European operatic forms with African American music and culture. Education is central to its story, and the work reflects Joplin’s lifelong conviction that education could lead communities away from ignorance and superstition.

He published the opera himself but could never secure the full-scale production he wanted. Joplin died in New York on April 1, 1917, at about 49 years old. He was buried in a grave that, remarkably, remained unmarked until 1974.

Scott Joplin Fades Away — and Then Comes Back

Ragtime itself gradually fell out of fashion as jazz and other musical forms took center stage. Joplin’s name never disappeared entirely, but much of his music slipped out of mainstream popular consciousness.

Then the revival began.

Scholars and musicians started taking a fresh look at Joplin in the mid-twentieth century, and pianist Joshua Rifkin’s recordings in the early 1970s helped introduce his compositions to a new audience. Treemonisha, which Joplin had been unable to stage properly during his lifetime, finally received a major production in Atlanta in 1972.

Then George Roy Hill encountered Joplin’s music while preparing a movie about two confidence men.

“The Entertainer” Meets The Sting

Hill was directing The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The story takes place in 1936, and Hill wanted music that captured the playful, mischievous spirit of the elaborate con at the center of the movie.

According to Hill’s account, hearing his son and nephew playing Joplin’s rags on the piano convinced him that he had found the sound he wanted. There was just that pesky chronological problem: ragtime belonged principally to an earlier era.

Hill knew it. He simply decided that atmosphere mattered more than strict period accuracy. As he explained in the soundtrack liner notes quoted by Turner Classic Movies, he had no philosophical objection to using historically inappropriate music if it produced the right emotional effect.

Composer Marvin Hamlisch was hired to adapt Joplin’s music for the film. The score included “The Entertainer,” “Gladiolus Rag,” “Pine Apple Rag,” “The Ragtime Dance,” and “Solace.”

It worked spectacularly.

Film music has produced plenty of unlikely cultural afterlives — including instrumental performances that become inseparable from the movies around them, something we have also seen in the story of Tommy Johnson, the tuba player behind Jaws and other familiar Hollywood sounds. But what happened to Joplin was especially remarkable because the composer had already been dead for 56 years when The Sting premiered.

A 72-Year-Old Song Becomes a Top-Three Hit

The Sting became one of the biggest movies of 1973 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Hamlisch also won an Oscar for his adaptation of Joplin’s music for the film.

Then “The Entertainer” did something Scott Joplin could hardly have imagined when John Stark published it for piano players in 1902.

It became a pop hit.

Hamlisch’s version was released as a single and climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1974. A piece written when Theodore Roosevelt was president was suddenly competing on the American pop charts with performers such as Paul McCartney and Wings, the Jackson 5, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot.

This was not some vaguely Joplin-inspired tune that happened to borrow a melody. The composer credited on “The Entertainer” was still Scott Joplin.

He had simply needed 72 years to break into the Top 10.

The King of Ragtime Finally Gets His Serious-Music Recognition

The Joplin revival continued. In 1976, the Pulitzer Prize Board bestowed a special posthumous award on Scott Joplin “for his contributions to American music.”

There is something wonderfully bittersweet about the timing. During his life, Joplin spent years trying to persuade the musical establishment that he was more than a writer of entertaining piano pieces. He wanted audiences to recognize the sophistication in ragtime and to take seriously his larger ambitions as a composer.

He never saw Treemonisha receive the production he believed it deserved. He never heard a conventional recording of “The Entertainer.” He never experienced the revival of his reputation. His grave remained unmarked for more than half a century after his death.

And then, almost all at once, America rediscovered him.

The Entertainer Outlived Everyone

There probably was no single dramatic moment when Scott Joplin sat down and composed “The Entertainer.” The real story is better because it stretches across generations.

A Black musician who had been given classical music lessons as a poor child in Texas grew into the most important composer of ragtime. He wrote a piece in a modest St. Louis apartment in 1902, dedicated it to a largely mysterious mandolin club, and specifically warned performers not to play his music too quickly.

Twenty-six years later, the first known commercial recording based on “The Entertainer” appeared as a mandolin-and-guitar adaptation. Decades after that, a movie director knowingly dropped the composition into the wrong historical period because the music simply felt right. The resulting adaptation carried Joplin onto the pop charts 57 years after his death and helped introduce millions of people to a composer whom much of America had largely forgotten.

Scott Joplin spent his career insisting that ragtime deserved to be treated as serious music.

History took its time answering.

But eventually, it agreed.

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