For decades ragtime aficionados have been searching for a lost trunk supposedly containing unpublished music manuscripts by Scott Joplin. Edward Berlin, author of King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, suggests Joplin may have lost the trunk in Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1903. Selected sources on Pittsburg and other cities and towns in Kansas are now available on Kansas Memory under the category Places--Cities and Towns.
Here’s the story. Joplin, the African American composer of the Maple Leaf Rag (1899) and other popular piano rags, had recently finished composing his first ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor. The year was 1903.
Joplin was on a Midwestern tour with his Ragtime Opera Company scheduled to play shows in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. A misfortune in Springfield, Illinois, possibly left Joplin without money to continue. But Berlin suggests Joplin may have continued the tour to recoup his losses. A poor showing at the Pittsburg [Kansas] Opera House, which Joplin was scheduled to play on September 17, may have left him unable to pay his hotel bill resulting in the confiscation of his trunk. According to Joplin’s wife Lottie, the trunk contained photos, letters, and unpublished manuscripts of a Guest of Honor and other music. Joplin never recovered the trunk. This photo shows the Pittsburg Opera House at left.
Berlin’s scenario is hypothetical, but it is a plausible explanation to a mystery that has confounded researchers for decades. Other accounts have placed the trunk in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, around the same time. This photo shows the Pittsburg National Bank located on the corner opposite the Pittsburg Opera House.
More than any other composer, Joplin raised instrumental ragtime, with its foundation in itinerant piano players and African American folk melodies, to the level of classical music and launched a craze for syncopation that dominated popular culture in the early 1900s. Still, Joplin’s success was continually dogged by the racial prejudices of his time and the stereotype of the blackface minstrel, as represented in this photo of Haverlaff’s Minstrels performing in a White Cloud, Kansas, opera house. James Scott and Brunson S. ("Brun") Campbell were but two Kansas ragtimers who had a close relationship with Joplin.
While we do not hold Joplin’s lost manuscripts (regrettably), selected materials on Pittsburg and other cities and towns in Kansas, music, and African American history are available on Kansas Memory.
Sources: Edward Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).