![]() His race didn’t register with me as particularly important, but on the other hand, from somewhere I’d absorbed the idea that ragtime music was simpler and less important than the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. I’d at least learned that Joplin was Black because his photo appeared on my spiral-bound volume of his music. I still knew nothing about Joplin, the man, when I was 14 and my piano teacher asked me to learn “Maple Leaf Rag.” Or I knew almost nothing. I’m not ashamed of this, but it’s baffling to think that in the 1990s I lived in a place where I was able to spend a year playing “The Entertainer” and learn absolutely nothing about the history of African American music, specifically ragtime, and the life of Scott Joplin.Ī 1902 score of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” ![]() I presumed that the imagery associated with minstrelsy was normal and innocuous, just as I thought topless showgirls performing in my city’s casinos was. I don’t know about her, but I never once thought deeply about what the lyrics evoked: a “mask that grins and lies.” The entertainer I envisioned was a lot like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who looks happy tap-dancing alongside Shirley Temple in her childhood movie series. ![]() We created a duet and took turns singing the words. She’d never taken piano lessons, but she patiently learned the right-hand notes and I accompanied her with the left-hand part. ![]() My babysitter, who was 13 and also white, loved “The Entertainer” so much that she asked me to teach her how to play it. The lyrics on my sheet music described a clownish performer doing “snappy patter and jokes” that please “the folks.” I know I imagined a Black man on stage, but I didn’t know about minstrel shows or much else about America’s racist past and present. I didn’t feel sad when I played it, though I missed my dad fiercely instead, I felt indefatigable and industrious. I played it obsessively, perhaps because it occupied my hands and sounded jolly. Before and after school, I played “The Entertainer” on an out-of-tune piano in my mother’s classroom. I’d moved from Las Vegas to Reno with my mother, a kindergarten teacher. In 1991, when I was eight years old, I found a simplified version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and relished playing it for most of the year that I was in third grade. His compositions became more and more intricate, until they were almost jazz Bach.- Music publisher Edward B.
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