A piano plinks - and you learn about Scott Joplin

Author: By Michael A. Schuman, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, February 2, 1997

Page: M8

Section: Travel

Before 1974, few other than ragtime music diehards had heard of Scott Joplin. But after the movie ``The Sting'' became a huge hit in the early winter months of that year, Scott Joplin became a household name.

Joplin's ragtime music, incredibly popular around the turn of the century, was heard throughout the movie as arranged by Marvin Hamlisch, the Oscar and Grammy-winning composer and pianist. ``The Sting'' won seven Academy Awards, including best picture, and it also spawned a hit single, Hamlisch's ``The Entertainer,'' based on a song Joplin wrote in 1902. ``The Entertainer'' reached No. 3 on Billboard Magazine's Hot 100 list in 1974.

After decades of obscurity, the public had rediscovered Joplin. You can meet him today in St. Louis at the only home of those in which he lived that is still standing. A 25-minute guided tour takes you through exhibit rooms and a reproduced turn-of-the-century flat. Following the tour, you have time on your own to pore over exhibits relating to Joplin's life and accomplishments.

To appreciate Joplin's significance in American musical History, one should understand ragtime. At Joplin's home, you learn about the syncopated, bouncy, piano-dominated music, originally known as ``ragged time,'' because of its supposed ragged sound.

Traditionalists didn't listen to ragtime when it was first developed. They thought it was immoral. Yet, according to Jan Douglas, the administrator of the Scott Joplin House, ``Ragtime made an amazing transition from music of the counterculture and the black culture to music of the mainstream. It made a sudden transition from the whorehouse to the parlor.''

You get to hear some classic ragtime at the end of the guided tour. In a chamber now designated as the music room, a vintage player piano, circa 1915, cranks out the frisky sound of Joplin and other ragtime performers like Tom Turpin and Eubie Blake. A small rack full of periodicals about the music lets you learn more while you listen.

The brick, two-family home with arched doors and windows was just over 30 years old when Joplin moved in with his wife in 1900. Joplin lived and worked here until 1903, composing tunes like ``The Entertainer,'' ``Elite Syncopation'' and ``The Ragtime Dance'' on a piano similar to the James A. Olmstrom cabinet grand sitting in an upstairs parlor today.

The Joplin House staff speculates that the actual piano the composer used came with the apartment. He was living the life of an itinerant musician and, unlike a flutist or guitarist, couldn't easily travel with his chosen instrument. By the time Joplin moved into this house, he was spending most of his time at the piano composing and teaching, performing only on occasion. Sheet music for ``The Entertainer'' and ``Maple Leaf Rag'' rests on the keyboard.

It was his composing and not his performing that earned Joplin and his wife the money to settle here. Joplin published ``Maple Leaf Rag'' in 1899, and within six months it sold 75,000 copies of sheet music. It was a smash in the contemporary world of ragtime, and would become the first sheet music ever to sell more than a million copies.

You read on the first floor that Scott was a child prodigy and was writing, improvising and playing music in his home in Texarkana, Texas, by age 11. Soon he was playing in a small band in front of local crowds. Restless and in search of a larger audience than could be found in Texarkana, he hit the road around age 14 in 1882 and for the better part of a decade wandered through the mid-South, playing in the pool halls, saloons, theaters and brothels of St. Louis, New Orleans, Nashville and Louisville.

It was the central Missouri town of Sedalia that influenced Joplin's life in a more substantial way than any of the bigger cities. Sedalia was the home of a predominantly black George Smith College, and although Joplin was a gifted natural musician, he adored the idea of a formal education.

What musical skills Joplin didn't learn in the school of hard knocks he learned at the school in Sedalia. He took music classes and experimented with complex musical rhythms. Sedalia was also where he met his wife, Belle Hayden.

And in Sedalia he made his first major business contact, a white music shop owner named John Stark. Stark heard Joplin play in a local night spot called the Maple Leaf Club and was so impressed he decided to publish ``Maple Leaf Rag,'' the tune that brought Joplin financial stability. One posted photograph shows the white-bearded, middle-aged Stark sitting at a desk. Another presents a rundown Maple Leaf Club, obviously taken years after its prime.

You also see an exhibit showcasing the evolution of recorded music, with a Victrola cylinder and Edison 80-speed phonograph record and a modern cassette tape. But in Joplin's day, music was available for mass purchase only as sheet music, and several covers of Joplin's are on view.

To comprehend the racial climate in which Joplin worked, note the cover of the sheet music for his most famous song, ``The Entertainer,'' graced by today's standards with a remarkably racist illustration of a stereotypical strutting, top-hatted black man on stage. The cover of ``Maple Leaf Rag'' is less offensive; it's simply a maple leaf.

You get an idea of the Joplins' living quarters on the second floor. The coal-burning stove in the kitchen was used for cooking, and the bedroom fireplace kept the couple warm in winter. On muggy St. Louis summer nights, they would often slumber outdoors on the adjacent sleeping porch.

On top of a cabinet in the parlor is a violin, and it is in this room that visitors are told about the time Scott tried to teach Belle how to play. Our guide said, ``It probably didn't go too well, since they never spoke about it.''

The marriage didn't last, the couple separating shortly after their only child, a baby daughter, died. Joplin ultimately remarried and moved to New York.

You read in the Joplin House about the composer's pet project, an opera called ``Treemonisha'' that Joplin began writing around 1909. ``Treemonisha'' told the story of a free black couple in the years immediately following the Civil War. They adopt a baby girl who grows up to become a teacher and leader. Nobody, not even Joplin's longtime friend, John Stark, felt it could be a commercial success, and so Joplin was unable to get a publisher.

Obsessed with ``Treemonisha,'' Joplin himself arranged to have the opera published, and for the next few years, he scrimped, saved and sweated to bring it to the stage. He had resigned himself to the fact he alone would have to produce it. Finally, in 1915, it was performed in Harlem, with Joplin providing most of the music on piano. The audience was unimpressed and ``Treemonisha'' immediately closed.

Joplin was devastated. And with ragtime music rapidly losing popularity in favor of the more complex jazz, Joplin lapsed into periods of depression. He died at age 49 from complications of syphillis two years later in a hospital for the mentally ill in Manhattan.

``Treemonisha'' was performed for a second time 57 years later, in Atlanta, in 1972. In 1976, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music.

Plans: The house next door is being refurbished. The first floor will boast a new Rosebud Cafe with live ragtime. (An old Rosebud Cafe thrived roughly five blocks away around the turn of the century.) Plans are to make the second floor into a setting for concert performances. Target opening date is between late 1997 and mid1998.

Information: Scott Joplin House State Historic Site, 2658 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63103; telephone (3414) 533-1003.

For information on other African-American historic sites in St. Louis: St. Louis Convention & Visitors Bureau, Suite 1000, 10 South Broadway, St. Louis, MO 63102; telephone (314) 421-1023 or (800) 325-7962.

Lodging: Best Western Inn at the Park, 4630 Lindell Ave.; (314) 367-7500; doubles: $65-$85. Holiday Inn Forest Park, 5915 Wilson Ave.; (314) 645-0700; doubles: $69-$85. Red Roof Inn-Hampton, 5823 Wilson Ave.; (314) 645-0101; doubles: $57-$87.

Dining: Union Station is a train station turned shopping and dining complex and includes Charlie Spoon's Restaurant & Grill (American and ethnic cuisines); Landry's Seafood; Houlihan's (American cuisine); and even a politically incorrect Hooters. Laclede's Landing, the area between the Gateway Arch and the Mississippi River, boasts cobblestone streets and warehouses-turned-restaurants such as The Old Spaghetti Factory; Jake's Steaks (barbecue); and the Royal Dumpe Dinner Theatre (Elizabethan musical comedy while you eat).