Who are the big three of ragtime???
Surprisingly, there has really been no debate as to who the big three of ragtime are. Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb have been long considered,(at least long to me), the 3 greatest composers of ragtime. They composed classic rags in the early 20th-century, setting the standard for "high-class ragtime." At festivals like the Scott Joplin Festival in Sedalia, these composer's rags are the nost commonly performed. However, the fact that these three are exploited so much overshadows many other lesser-known yet prominent composers. Other composers have illuminated with the occasional creative and varied rag. Eubie Blake, for instance, had many outstanding rags which pushed the limit of what would be considered classic ragtime. Unfortunately, Scott Joplin's popularity, especially in the early 70's because of the "Sting", created a dark cloud over ragtime in the public eye. Even today, many people hold ignorant misrepresentations of what ragtime is really about, but mention "The Entertainer", and you get a response as if they were ragtime aficionados. That point aside, let us examine who "The Big Three" consisted of...
Scott Joplin- so much has been said about Scott Joplin that there really is nothing else to say. Scott Joplin led an interesting life. He lost 2 wives, had many disputes over song publishing with Stark and stolen songs by Irving Berlin. These setbacks make what he accomplished even more incredible. Undoubtedly, Scott Joplin is the finest composer of ragtime. All of us today strive in some way or another to create songs of Joplin quality. It's hard!!! Most of us give up trying to be him and make our own style of ragtime come alive instead...what a great asset!!! In this way, we get many types of rags and many composers also.
As for biographical information, Scott Joplin was supposedly born in 1868 in Texarkana, Texas. We can't be sure,(this is an account given by Lottie, some time later, and there was no Texarkana, Texas this year!!), but this is what we have to go on. His parent's names were Giles Joplin and Florence Givens and brothers Monroe, Robert, Osie, William, and Myrtle.They were a musical family. Florence played the banjo and sang, Giles played the violin, as with Scott, Robert, and William. Robert and William both went on to be professional musicians.
Scott's piano aspirations began at the age of 7, when he played the piano at a neighbors while his mother cleaned the house. Apparently, sometime later, Julius Weiss, a German immigrant and piano teacher, heard Scott playing and was impressed by his abilities. He later gave him free piano lessons and exposed him to European music. It was this man who focused Scott's attention on the musical life, and gave him a basis with which to form a career.
As for work, in 1885 he was working at "Honest John" Turpin's Silver Dollar Saloon in St. Louis. In 1893, he, along with thousands of other itinerant musicians, attended the Chicago World's Fair; (his presence there has been later verified by a postcard from him at the fair). He then settled in Sedalia for the first time, joining the Queen City Concert Band as th second cornetist. Sometime later, he left and formed the Texas Medley Quartet, and it is with them he composed his first published songs "Please Say You Will" and "A Picture of Her Face". Later on, it is thought Joplin attended the George R. Smith College for Negroes, where he studied theory, harmony, and composition. Also at this time, Joplin befriended Marie Walker, a music store owner who helped him write his songs. During his supposed studies, in 1897 Joplin began writing rags. Examples of these are "Original Rags" and "The Maple Leaf Rag".
After this crucial point in Joplin's life, (due largely to the exuberant success of the "Maple Leaf Rag"), Joplin became free to give up the performing life to teach piano and compose ragtime. After marrying Belle Hayden, (the sister of Joplin's student and friend Scott Hayden), the young couple moved to St. Louis. After the death of their two-month-old girl, Joplin and Belle grew apart and Belle died in 1906. It is at this time that the mysterious Freddie comes into Joplin's life. Her existence can be scantily supported, yet there is reasonable cause to believe she existed and won the heart of Scott. They married, yet bliss would not last long, for Freddie was deathly ill, and, after only six months of marriage, Freddie died with Scott at her side. It is quite possible that the pictorial on the cover of "Bethena Waltz" is a wedding portrait of Freddie. A nice thought, no?
After this major setback and heartbreak, Joplin sought to start anew and moved to New York City in 1907, where Stark had set up his editorial office. It is there he met Lottie Stokes. They married in 1909, and Lottie, unlike Belle, was very supportive and nurturing of Joplin's musical inspirations. She provided him with the comfort, love, and understanding to further inspire his musical ideas. It was at this time that Joplin was composing his master opera "Treemonisha", and composing high-quality classic rags. However, when Treemonisha failed miserably as an opera in 1914, Joplin's spirits were crushed, and he plunged into desolate madness. In fits of psychological clarity, he sketched a few bars of music here and there. Yet, as madness grasped hold tighter and tighter, his paranoia caused him to destroy a multitude of manuscripts of unpublished scores... for fear they would be stolen. Lottie had no choice but to have him committed to a psychological ward at a New York hospital, where he died alone in 1917 on April the first. The official cause of death was marked "Syphilis Dimentia", yet it is generally accepted he died of a broken heart.
*Major sources for this article were Ed Berlin's "King of Ragtime" and Trebor Tichenor and Dave Jasen's "Rags and Ragtime"--- I take full responsibilty for the interpretation...
James Sylvester Scott-The least amount of information about this prominent ragtimer is known of the three. The 31 rags which he wrote during his lifetime give testament to an artist who synthesized the African-American folk tradition with his professional career in popular and jazz music. This resulted in a highly developmental spirit in his compositions. The best keyboardist of "The Big Three", he loved to show off with lyrical melody lines punctuated with abrubt and difficult phrases. James Scott, unlike Scott Joplin, wrote songs mostly in one mood, and preferred to extravagate the pianistics which accompany the ragtime idiom, rather than develop a piece emotionally.
As for biographical information, James Scott was born in Neosho, Missouri on February 12th, 1885. He was the second child in a family of six, and was gifted with perfect pitch. After gaining a thorough grounding in both playing and theory from local pianist John Coleman, his family moved to Carthage in 1901. His parents, James Sr. and Molly Thomas Scott, were former slaves who struggled to find work to support their large family. James Jr. started his professional musical career by playing at the famed Lakeside Park, both on the piano and steam calliope. In 1902, he got a job at the Dumars Music Store, where he worked as a window-washer and store sweeper. However, as the demand for Scott's clever tunes grew, the Dumars Store was inclined to publish his work. In 1906, James took a trip to St. Louis where he met Scott Joplin and John Stark. Stark published Scott's "Frog Legs Rag" in 1907, and it became the second leading money maker behind Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag". From that moment on, Stark published any rag James could throw at him. It was a profitable business relationship which ended in 1922 with the publication of "Don't Jazz Me Rag- I'm Music". Ironically, the song contained a multitude of elements which would later be associated with jazz.
Although the last years of his life were spent in poor health, he continued composing music until the day he died, August 30th, 1938.
*The major source for this article was Trebor Tichenor and Dave Jasen's "Rags and Ragtime" from Dover Publications
Joseph Francis Lamb- Joseph Lamb was the only one of the "Classic" ragtimers to live long enough to see the ragtime revitalization started in the late 1940's. He was an invaluable resource to pioneering ragtimers such as Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis (They All Played Ragtime), as he provided first-person testimony about the legendary Scott Joplin and John Stark. His rags are a creative goldmine because they combine the strength of Joplin's ideas with James Scott's call-and-response and rhythmic exuberance. The best of both worlds, nonetheless.
Biographically speaking, Joseph F. Lamb was born in Montclair, New Jersey, December 6th, 1887. The youngest son in a family of four children, Lamb grew up in a strict Irish-Catholic neighborhood. At about the age of eight, he asked his older sisters to teach him the piano lessons they were taking. Despite these efforts however, Lamb was mostly self-taught. Upon his father's death in 1900, Lamb was sent to St. Jerome's College in Berlin, Ontario, where he enrolled as a pre-engineering student. However, as his infatuation for composing piano music flourished, his academia suffered... besides, the nuns who ran the school did not believe that a man of God should spend his time in the red-light districts soaking up ragtime. He got a job as an office boy at a wholesale drygoods company in 1904 and never returned to school.
Lamb found himself infatuated with the music of Joplin, and in 1907 he went to the Stark office in Manhattan where he purchased most of their rags. There he met Joplin, and when he demonstrated his own rags to Joplin several evenings later, Joplin liked the rags enough to get Stark to publish them. From that point on, Stark took anything Lamb wrote as well.
After the publication of "Bohemia", Lamb's last rag published during his lifetime, he found work as an arranger. When his wife, Henrietta Schultz, died during the flu epidemic in 1920, she left Joe with a 5-year-old son. Although heartbroken, Lamb remarried in two years to Amelia Collins, and moved to Brooklyn to start a new life. Then 30 years later, Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis approached Lamb about the issue and recognition in their new book, They All Played Ragtime. Inspired, Lamb worked to finish incomplete mauscripts dusty from 30 years of disuse, and he even began composing new ragtime pieces as well.
As he prepared pieces for publication in 1960, Joseph Lamb, at the age of seventy-two, quietly died from a heart attack. Four years later, his wife Amelia published the volume "Ragtime Treasures", in a tribute to Lamb certainly deserving of its title.