Scott Joplin: Encyclopedia II - Scott Joplin - Illness

Scott Joplin - Illness

Joplin wanted to experiment further with compositions like Treemonisha, but by 1916 he was suffering from the effects of terminal syphilis. He suffered later from dementia, paranoia, paralysis and other symptoms. Despite this, he recorded six piano rolls that year — Maple Leaf Rag (for Connorized and Uni-Record labels), Something Doing, Magnetic Rag, Ole Miss Rag, and Pleasant Moments (all for Connorized). These are the only records of his playing we have, and are interesting for the embellishments added by Joplin to his performances. A surviving copy of the 'Pleasant Moments' roll has not yet been discovered. It has been claimed that the uneven nature of some of Joplin's piano rolls, such as one of the recordings of the Maple Leaf Rag mentioned above, documented the extent of Joplin's physical deterioration due to syphilis. However, the irregularities are just as likely due to the primitive technology used to record the rolls.

In mid-January 1917 Joplin was hospitalized at Manhattan State Hospital in New York City, and friends recounted that he would have bursts of lucidity in which he would jot down lines of music hurriedly before relapsing. Joplin died there on April 1, 1917. His death did not make the headlines for two reasons: ragtime was quickly losing ground to jazz and the United States would enter World War I within days. He was buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in the Astoria section of Queens.

Joplin's musical papers, including unpublished manuscripts, were willed to Joplin's friend and the executor of his will, musician and composer Wilber Sweatman. Sweatman took care of these papers and generously shared access to them to those who enquired. However these were unfortunately few, since Joplin's music had come to be considered passé. After Sweatman's death in 1961 the papers were last known to go into storage during a legal battle among Sweatman's heirs; their current location is not known, nor even if they still exist.

There was, however, an important find in 1971 — a piano-roll copy of the lost "Silver Swan Rag," cut sometime around 1914. It had not been published in sheet-music form in Joplin's lifetime. Before this, his only posthumously published piece had been "Reflection Rag", put together by Stark in 1917 from fragments of Joplin melodies in Stark's archives.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Illness", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki