The Ragtime Kid

by Larry Karp

  When Brun’s train rolled into the depot, he had to wait while a good number of colored got off, early arrivals for the Emancipation Day program next day. As they pushed past Brun, laughing, talking, humming tunes, the boy had to work hard at not crying like a sissy. But later, in the passenger coach, when he took Joplin’s half-dollar from his pocket and remembered the sadness around his teacher’s eyes as he’d given Brun the coin, there was no holding back. He just let the waterworks run.

  By the time the train pulled into St. Louis, though, Brun had eaten his sandwiches and cake, and was feeling considerably more upbeat. Didn’t Boone say he ought to go to the Rosebud Saloon and listen to Tom Turpin play? Maybe Turpin hadn’t left yet for Sedalia. Brun could tell Mr. Turpin he’d been a pupil of Scott Joplin’s, maybe even play the man a little of “Harlem Rag,” and who could say what just might come out of that? Before the train even came to a full stop, first off was Mr. Brun Campbell, looking around for a porter to point him in the direction of the Rosebud.

  ***

  Walter Overstreet walked slowly up the path to the little cottage on Morgan Street. He’d sworn an oath of silence regarding what had happened the night before, but many years earlier he’d sworn another oath, to Hippocrates. He hoped Big Henry and Mattie would take some comfort from the assurance that those responsible for their son’s death were now dead themselves, the result of action by men and women—white men and women—who did not want them to get away with what they’d done. But that wasn’t the whole ball of wax. The doctor knew he’d crossed a line to invade a dangerous neck of woods beyond the farthest reach of sympathy and justice. He shrugged, shook his head. Enough thinking. He raised a fist to the door.

  The Last Word

  Seattle, Washington

  February, 2006

  In 1899, people called ragtime nigger-music, as if only a black could write, play or appreciate ragtime, and a white could not and shouldn’t even try. As if blacks and whites are born tone-deaf to each other’s music, can’t hear the rhythms of the others’ hearts or the melodies in their souls. That’s the legacy of slavery in our land. It cuts both ways, and it cuts deep.

  But it’s the bunk.

  Consider this. Musicians and historians now refer to Scott Joplin and two other composers, James Scott and Joseph Lamb, as the Big Three of classic ragtime. At the time of the ragtime revival some sixty years ago, Scott was known to live in Kansas City and to be black, but Lamb had dropped entirely from sight. He was finally located in Brooklyn, New York, in 1949, and when he opened his door to the ragtime enthusiasts who had run him to ground, the scholars were astonished to find themselves staring at a man indisputably white.

  And this. The great majority of composers, musicians and historians of the ragtime renaissance were white.

  And this. In his 1936 book The Negro and His Music, the black philosopher Alain Locke mentioned Scott Joplin only to include him in a short discussion of white ragtime pioneers, whose work, once properly refined and polished, reached its quintessence in Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

  And this. In his Biographical Dictionary of American Music, published in 1973, Charles Eugene Claghorn, a white man, referred to S. Brun Campbell, The Ragtime Kid, as a black itinerant pianist.

  And this. Tom Ireland, who played along with Joplin in the Queen City Band, remembered Otis Saunders, an active and prominent ragtime musician, as a white man.

  So much for racial separatism in musical aptitude and appreciation.

  So much for infallibility of historical records.

  ***

  History is generous with who, what, where and when, but often stingy with why. There’s no disputing that on August 10, 1899, a white man named John Stark signed a contract with a young black composer, Scott Joplin, to publish Joplin’s tune “Maple Leaf Rag.” Remarkably, this contract stipulated that Joplin would receive royalties on sales of the music, a penny a copy. Those days, with the exception of a few vaudeville top-liners, black composers were lucky to get ten or twenty dollars outright from a publisher for a piece of music.

  “Maple Leaf Rag” took the country by storm. Historical accounts vary, but over the years it probably sold more than a million copies. In any case, it provided both Stark and Joplin with significant income throughout their lives. But then along came jazz, and for a generation or more, ragtime, Scott Joplin and John Stark were forgotten.

  During the 1940s, some serious music people—historians, college professors, professional musicians—rediscovered ragtime. They wrote articles in prominent music magazines, describing ragtime as our first truly American music form. They wondered just how John Stark and Scott Joplin had happened to get together to publish “Maple Leaf Rag,” and raced the clock to find and talk with people still around who had been there.

  But those ragtime revivalists got as many versions of the anecdote as they did interviews. Even immediate members of the Stark family told different stories. Stark went to the Maple Leaf Club for a beer on a hot August afternoon, heard Scott Joplin play “Maple Leaf Rag,” and signed him up on the spot. Wait, that’s wrong. Joplin taught a little colored boy to play “Maple Leaf,” then brought him into Stark’s place to show Stark that anybody could play his catchy tune. No, that’s not how it went. Joplin walked into the Stark and Son Music Store one day with the “Maple Leaf” manuscript under his arm, and though John Stark wasn’t impressed, his son Will convinced him to take it. Hey, that’s not right. Robert Higdon, a young attorney and a friend of both Joplin and Will Stark, told Joplin he ought to get his music published, wrote out a contract, negotiated with Stark, and that was that. On and on went the interviews. But no interviewee seems to have mentioned those penny-a-sheet royalties for the black composer.

  Why did a man nearly sixty years old, proprietor of a successful music store, who’d done no more than dabble in music publishing by printing copies of a few very conventional pieces, decide to bring out the work of an unknown young black composer? Why did that composer, so determined to write “respectable” music, entrust his work to such an inexperienced publisher? And above all, why did John Stark agree to a royalties contract, such a striking exception to common practice of the time?

  The most carefully drawn historical accounts have holes you can drive a truck through. Or better, a story. Because where the facts of history are incomplete, fiction provides an opportunity to gain insight and understanding by uncovering a truth ignored or even hidden by history—perhaps a truth more striking and wondrous than any historical reality.

  ***

  In writing this story, I did my best not to alter or contradict well-established historical data. Rather, I wanted to use history as a framework for a fictional attempt to illuminate and comprehend the motives of the people involved.

  I accepted that Scott Joplin was a single-minded composer of music, a serious and sober man who rarely smiled, but gave generously of his time to help young musicians and composers. As a teenager in Texarkana, Joplin was discovered and tutored by an immigrant German teacher named Julius Weiss. Joplin’s demeanor inspired respect from blacks and whites alike. He wanted his work to be regarded with similar respect, and was displeased that the publisher of his “Original Rags,” Carl Hoffman, had put Charles Daniels’ name on the sheet-music cover as arranger. The young composer’s best friend between 1893 and 1899 was Otis (Crackerjack) Saunders, but they had a critical falling-out in or shortly after 1899, allegedly over authorship of “Maple Leaf Rag.”

  According to Brun Campbell’s own account, he met Saunders in Oklahoma City in 1898, played “Maple Leaf Rag” from the original manuscript, and then the following year ran off to Sedalia to study piano with Joplin. But it’s not at all clear just when in 1899 Brun did go to Sedalia, how long he stayed, or how many lessons Joplin gave him.

  John Stark fought for the Union throughout the Civil War, was based for a time in New Orleans, where he married Sarah Ann Casey (who was sixteen and a half at the tim
e, not thirteen, as has been stated in a number of histories) in 1865, and sent her up the Mississippi to his brother’s farm in Indiana. There is in Stark’s army record an unexplained six-weeks’ desertion during the spring of 1865. After the war, he went from farming to ice-cream manufacturing to peddling organs; finally, during the mid-1880s, he settled in Sedalia to operate a music store.

  John William (Blind) Boone was at the height of his fame as a touring piano virtuoso and composer, giving concerts of American and European music, and inviting people to come up on-stage and play tunes of their choice, which he then would reproduce, note-perfect, mistakes and all. In his infancy, Boone had become ill with a “brain fever,” and the doctors said the only way to save him was to take out his eyes, which they did. All the skills I attributed to Boone, including the ability to tell color by touch, are supported by historical accounts of his life.

  Dr. Walter Overstreet was mayor of Sedalia between 1898 and 1900. P. D. Hastain and John Bothwell were prominent in city and state politics and were strong civic boosters; though they lost out on the State Capital, they did succeed in bringing the State Fair to Sedalia. Robert Higdon read law in Hastain’s office in 1898, and opened his own practice the following year. He became highly successful and quite wealthy, though his wife remained critical of his generosity in providing pro bono legal services for indigent clients. One of his six sisters died in childbirth in 1888, leaving a two-year-old daughter. Charles Daniels, at the Carl Hoffman Music Company, was on his way to becoming an accomplished and well-regarded composer and publisher. Apple John Reynolds had recently begun what developed into a half-century of walking the streets of Sedalia, selling fruit and—far ahead of his time—warning people of the dangers of tobacco and alcohol. Walker Williams was part-owner of the Maple Leaf Club. G. Tom Ireland was a well-regarded black newspaperman and musician.

  Some persons in my story began as no more than names on a yellowed page: High Henry, Belle Higdon, Police Chief J. Edward Love, Sheriff J. C. Williams, Gaylord Boutell and his saloon. Other persons were entirely fictional, including Elmo Freitag, Maisie McAllister, Emil and Fritz Alteneder, Big Henry and Mattie Ramberg, and Isaac Stark.

  There’s no suggestion that Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald were ever in Sedalia, let alone in 1899, but based upon extensive, consistent information presented by many of Frankie’s biographers, I feel certain I’ve drawn the Fitzgeralds’ characters faithfully, and I believe that if they had in fact found themselves in the predicament I put them into, they would have behaved just the way they did in my story.

  ***

  We should be grateful John Stark was not chloroformed at sixty. For the remaining twenty-eight years of his life after he and Joplin signed their contract, he was the most prominent publisher of ragtime music in the United States, and earned a reputation for fairness and generosity in his dealings with ragtime composers, whether black or white. Stark was far and away the most vigorous promoter and champion of classic ragtime; his advertising statements and claims bear witness to his unwavering commitment to the music of Scott Joplin and other composers of first-rate ragtime music. Stark’s last professional accomplishment, in 1927, was to secure renewal of the “Maple Leaf Rag” copyright for the Stark Music Company, as it was then called.

  Walter Overstreet left the mayor’s office in 1900, and continued to practice medicine in Sedalia until 1916, when he died following a bizarre psychotic episode. In his obituary, the Sedalia Democrat reported that Dr. Overstreet, “although a member of no church, lived a life that won for him the close friendship and high regard of all who knew him.”

  S. Brun Campbell, The Ragtime Kid, spent many years as an itinerant pianist in the midwest, then married and settled down to raise a family and work as a barber in Venice, California. Unfortunately, it seems Brun did not learn from his fictional experience; his wife was vehemently opposed to ragtime music, and would not permit him to play it in their house, so he kept pianos in his garage and barbershop. When ragtime was rediscovered, Brun did much to make certain Scott Joplin achieved his rightful place in music history (though many of Brun’s recollections were, to put it mildly, touched up or embellished). During Brun’s last years (he died in 1952), he recorded a number of ragtime pieces, some written by other composers, some by himself. Historians have referred to his performance as a time capsule of sorts, a first-hand demonstration of the style of most piano professors of fifty years earlier. The recordings reveal that Brun’s ear remained faithful to the barrelhouse manner of playing, closer to what now is called folk ragtime than to Joplin’s classic ragtime. Interestingly, Brun’s only published rag is named “Barrelhouse Rag.”

  Scott Joplin died in 1917, at the age of forty-nine, frustrated, and exhausted physically and emotionally. Back in Sedalia, Joplin had told Arthur Marshall that “Maple Leaf” would make him King of Ragtime, as indeed it did. But Joplin’s success seems never to have satisfied him. He wanted respect for his music, and to that end spent years writing extended ragtime pieces, including two operas. But those days, no one would produce an opera or a ballet by a black man; in fact, many refused to believe that a black man could write “serious” music. After his death, America embraced The Jazz Age, and forgot all about Scott Joplin.

  John Stark’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

  ***

  But his work goes soldiering on.

  With the mid-century rekindling of interest in ragtime, and changing social attitudes, Scott Joplin’s music finally was accorded the respect the composer had hoped for, and more. As if in fulfillment of his Sedalia-days prediction that his music would be appreciated in fifty years, Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis published They All Played Ragtime, the first major publication on ragtime music, in 1950. The authors dedicated their book to Joplin with a line written many years before by John Stark, proclaiming Joplin’s towering originality and genius.

  That was the beginning. In 1970, playing closely by the score, musicologist Joshua Rifkin recorded Joplin’s rags; since then, record stores have most commonly displayed Joplin’s work on classical-music shelves. On January 28, 1972, the Joplin opera Treemonisha premiered before a wildly enthusiastic audience at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center. In 1974, “The Entertainer” was used as the musical theme of the movie The Sting, and Scott Joplin suddenly became the hottest composer in the United States. In 1976, he was awarded a Bicentennial Pulitzer Prize for his lifetime of accomplishment in American music.

  And on June 1, 1999, the centenary of the publication of “Maple Leaf Rag,” attendees at the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia took time to dedicate the Joplin Memorial Park, at the corner of East Main Street and Lamine. They heard the Reverend Dr. Marvin Albright deliver this invocation/dedication prayer:

  “O Holy God,

  You have called us to sing a new song,

  to rejoice over the creativity and ingenuity of the human spirit which You have planted deep within the soul.

  This place, O God, calls to mind one soul.

  From a segregated moment in history, there arose one who spoke the universal language of the heart.

  From the pathos of pauperism there emerged a giant who enriched us with sounds that make us glad to be alive.

  From the dives of a dance hall, a new song swept over the land to set our toes to tapping and our feet to dancing.

  Today, we dedicate this place to the memory of Scott Joplin, father of ragtime, mother of a new musical art form, child of God.”

  Glory hallelujah an’ a-men, brother.

  Selected Bibliography

  History of Ragtime and Its Pioneers

  Affeldt, Paul A. “The Saga of Brun Campbell.” The Mississippi Rag, January 1988.

  Albrecht, Theodore. “Julius Weiss: Scott Joplin’s First Piano Teacher.” College Symposium, Vol. 19, Fall 1979.

  Berlin, Edward A. Ragtime, A Musical and Cultural History. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980.

  Berlin, Edward A.
King of Ragtime. Oxford University Press, New York, 1994.

  Berlin, Edward A. “A Biography of Scott Joplin.” Electronic publication, written for the exclusive use of the Scott Joplin International Foundation, 1998.

  Blesh, Rudi, and Janis, Harriet. They All Played Ragtime. Grove Press, New York, 1959. (Originally published by Knopf, 1950.)

  Campbell, Brun. “From Rags to Ragtime and Riches.” Jazz Journal, Vol. 2, No. 7, July 1949.

  Campbell, S. Brun. “From Rags to Ragtime, A Eulogy.” Jazz Report, Vol. 6, 1967.

  Campbell, S. Brunson. “The Ragtime Kid (An Autobiography).” Jazz Report, Vol. 6, 1967-68.

  Campbell, S. Brunson, and Carew, R. J. “Sedalia, Cradle of Ragtime.” The Record Changer, June 1945.

  Claghorn, Charles Eugene. Biographical Dictionary of American Music. Parker Publishing Company, West Nyack, NY, 1973.

  Curtis, Susan. Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune. University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO, 1994.

  Darch, Robert R. “Blind Boone, A Sensational Missourian Forgotten.” The Ragtimer, Vol. 6, No. 5-6, 1967.

  Egan, Richard. “Brun Campbell, The Rag-Time Warp.” Electronic publication, undated.

  Egan, Richard A., Jr. Brun Campbell, The Music of “The Ragtime Kid.” Morgan Publishing, St. Louis, 1993.

  Gammond, Peter. Scott Joplin and the Ragtime Era. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1976.

  Harrah, Madge. “The Incomparable Blind Boone.” The Ragtimer, July-August, 1969.

  Harrah, Madge. Blind Boone, Piano Prodigy. CarolRhoda Books, Minneapolis, 2004.

  Haskins, James. Scott Joplin. Doubleday, New York, 1978.

  Hasse, John Edward, ed. Ragtime, Its History, Composers and Music. Schirmer Books, New York, 1985.

  Jasen, David A., and Jones, Gene. That American Rag. Schirmer Books, New York, 2000.