Ragtime

Ragtime Ragtime, the joyous syncopated piano music from the Midwest, had its first publication in 1897. It wasn’t until 1899 that John Stark and Son published Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” in Sedalia, Missouri. From there, Stark moved to St. Louis, where the rag eventually sold more than one million copies of sheet music , thus establishing ragtime as a solid genre of popular music nationally and, during its first decade, internationally. Joplin was its leading composer, and such was his…