Scott Joplin

Scott Joplin, who was dubbed "The King of Ragtime Writers" early in his composing career, earned the title through diligence, innovation, and sheer talent. Although he was not entirely responsible for helping lower many of the barriers that stood between black composers and success, Joplin was a leader in this regard, if a passive one.

He was born in eastern Texas near Linden. The true birth date is unknown, and the common one of November 24 1868 was suggested by his last wife Lottie, although it was likely between July 19, 1867 (the day after the 1870 Census listing him as 2 years old) and mid-January of 1868 according to historian and Joplin biographer Ed Berlin. The June, 1880 Census lists him as 12 years old, further reinforcing this probability, and the 1900 Census lists him with an October birth date, although in 1872, a curiosity for certain.

Scott Joplin grew up in the uncertain era of reconstruction. His father, Giles Joplin (sometimes spelled Jiles), was a slave that was freed before the Civil War, and his mother, Florence, was freeborn. During Scott's first few years, his parents worked as tenant farmers. As the family grew, his father got a job with the railroad in Texarkana, and his mother took up house cleaning. Both parents were musical, and Scott learned to play the banjo at an early age. His obvious musical talent earned him offers from area piano teachers to tutor him for free. By the age of 12, he was competent at both interpreting and writing music. His father left home around that time to take up residence with another woman, but stayed minimally involved to some extent in Scott's life. He appears in the 1880 Census still with the family as a common laborer so he may have left within the year. The same record shows Florence and oldest son Monroe working as well, with Scott and Robert in school. The youngest Joplin, Johnny, is only 3 months old when the Census was taken in mid June. The Scott helped his mother raise his siblings, but always followed his passion for music. There are suggestions by Ed Berlin that during his mid to late teens he spent some time in Sedalia, likely with a relative, but came back at some point to Texarkana. Around age 19 or 20 he left home for good.

Scott spent the next few years as an itinerant pianist, developing his own style while absorbing influences of other Midwest musicians. He spent a great deal of time based in St. Louis, and went to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition (World's Fair) in 1893. It was here that ragtime music, then in its infancy, was most likely heard by the public, and by many other musicians as well for the first time. After the fair, Joplin formed various bands and singing groups, including the Texas Medley Quartette, which featured his two of his younger brothers, Robert and Will. After spending a little more time in St. Louis, Joplin settled for a time in Sedalia, Missouri in 1897, a move that would change his life. Already a published composer with some songs to his credit, he attended the George R. Smith College (founded to encourage higher education for African Americans) to further his musical knowledge. It was possibly there that he learned how to more accurately notate syncopation, a necessity for correctly writing down his ragtime compositions for others to play. Joplin performed in many area venues during this time both as a solo performer and with varying sizes of groups playing either piano or cornet. It was while working in one of these venues in 1899, the short-lived Maple Leaf Club, that he allegedly became involved with one of his greatest champions, publisher John Stark, and at the very least where he found the name for his first truly inspired rag.

Stark was impressed enough by Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag that he quickly published it, giving the composer a royalty (.01¢ per copy), which was unusual at this time, more so since Joplin was a black composer working with a white publisher. Since it was likely a lawyer friend of Joplin's that helped make the contact with Stark and drew up the contract, it may have been a mutually agreed upon point that not only provided protection for both parties, but would eventually alter Joplin's financial well-being, allowing him to spend more time composing. Stark further encouraged Joplin to bring him more compositions, of which the collaborative Sunflower Slow Drag may have been submitted around the same time. The Maple Leaf was nearly an instant hit locally, and over the next two decades became the first piano rag to reportedly sell a million copies, although when that mark was reached is unclear. Although the relationship between Stark and Joplin would often be strained over much of the next 18 years, the publisher always promoted Joplin's works as the finest in his catalog. Those periods of animosity between them are in part demonstrated by name of varying publishers at the bottom of each new Joplin rag.

In the 1900 Census Joplin is listed as a musician, with his birthday curiously put down as October of 1872, and his age as 27. He was lodging in the home of Susan H. Hankins, who was also hosting Belle Hayden Jones, the recently widowed sister-in-law of one of his young students, Scott Hayden. Just before he moved to St. Louis in 1901, Joplin (as some evidence suggests) possibly married Belle, and it may have also been a common-law marriage. The year of 1902 found Joplin at odds with Stark over publication of an extended rag ballet intended for stage or social events, which had evidently been performed as early as 1900 in Sedalia. Stark grudgingly published this long version of The Ragtime Dance, which had been orchestrated and performed in St. Louis as well by this time, due largely to the prompting of his daughter Eleanor, but it did poorly as Stark expected. Still, with profits from the other rags in his catalog, John Stark was able to open a music store and publishing plant in St. Louis, and eventually an office New York for a few years. Joplin wrote an early ragtime opera finished in 1903 called A Guest of Honor (likely based on a formal visit to the Roosevelt White House by Booker T. Washington), and toured with it briefly in the late summer and fall of 1903. Although no score has been re-discovered, remnants potentially remain in the form of a rag and march, and some titles are known at the very least. Joplin and Belle had been at odds for some time in St. Louis. After they had a baby girl that died at two months, the couple became estranged. Belle later moved from St. Louis and lived until 1930 or so.

At some point after the money-losing Guest of Honor tour, Joplin spent up to a few months in Chicago before returning to St. Louis. By the time the 1904 World's Fair opened in late April, he was probably back in Sedalia for a time. Sometime during this period he met a 19 year-old in Little Rock that had capture his heart. He married Freddie Alexander, who he had dedicated the first printing of the Chrysanthemum to, in late June, and traveled with her back to Sedalia, playing concerts along the way. However, as soon as the reached Sedalia in July, Freddie was confined to bed for a cold that developed into pneumonia, and which took her life in early September. This started a period of compositional malaise and possibly depression for the composer, who soon moved back to St. Louis. Subsequent printings of Chrysanthemum also had the dedication removed. By this time, John Stark had set up shop in New York in an effort to compete with larger publishers who were putting out ragtime inferior (his staunch belief) to what was in his catalog. Joplin eventually followed Stark to New York in 1907, never to return to the Midwest.

Some of Joplin's best-developed works are from the period 1907 to 1910, and they demonstrate the versatility of classic ragtime as well as a variety of textures that could be achieved within that framework. It was during this time that he met and allegedly married Lottie Stokes, although even approximate dates for this are unclear. He appears in the April 1910 Census as a musician and composer in Manhattan, plus widowed as would be consistent with the loss of Freddie. The wedding date of June of that year, as reported by Brun Campbell, would be most consistent with the time line, but inconsistent with other factors, such as her using her maiden name on a legal document in 1913. They were possibly never formally married, but she does appear as Lottie Joplin starting with the 1920 Census. There is some possibility that Lottie, born and raised in Washington DC, was married before she moved to Manhattan to run her boarding house, which would explain why she is hard to locate before 1913 when the two obviously were in a close relationship.

Joplin continued work on a project that had been in his mind for many years and would consume much of the rest of his life. He believed so much in his syncopated opera Treemonisha that he put everything he had into it, both emotionally and financially. Funding and support was hard to come by because so many investors were involved with Broadway shows offering more popular music, and those investing in opera were going for proven projects. Treemonisha, a story ahead of its time as it involves female leadership and has a strong message of education as a way to gain respect and equal rights among all men, ultimately had only one performance for potential investors in 1911 with Joplin playing in place of an orchestra and a bare stage set. (Treemonisha was successfully staged for the first time as originally intended in 1972 with a full scale re-orchestrated presentation in 1975 by the Houston Grand Opera).

Emotionally discouraged and mentally affected by the onset of syphilis, Joplin spent his remaining years, particularly 1915 on, slowly deteriorating physically and suffering from the onset of dementia. In early 1916 he did manage at least two different sessions where he recorded a handful of piano rolls, including Maple Leaf Rag, W.C. Handy's Ole Miss Rag, and his waltz Pleasant Moments. All but one of these is not accurate indicators of how he would have been playing at that time since they were obviously edited for timing and other errors. The exception is one of his Maple Leaf Rag performances which is uneven and halting at times, but it may have also been edited to some extent. Without an audio recording it is hard to determine exactly how he played, and between even 1914 and 1916 there would have been some significant differences. Joplin finally succumbed to the disease on April 1, 1917, six weeks after having been committed to Bellevue Hospital. Lottie Joplin long regretted not fulfilling her husband's insistent request that the Maple Leaf Rag be played at his funeral. Nonetheless, his music remains an inherent part of American music history, and his contributions to not just Black Americans but to all Americans are long lasting.

As for what happened to some of Joplin's remaining papers and works, including some unpublished manuscripts, has also long been somewhat of a mystery. This includes the status of A Guest of Honor, but also some unfinished rags or songs. It is reported that historian Rudi Blesh saw some of them when visiting Lottie during his interviews in 1949 for They All Played Ragtime, and he jotted down some of the titles, many shown in the listings included here. The status of that box of papers since then is unknown, but speculations vary from being stolen to being accidentally left out in the trash to simply having been acquired by a new building owner who may have disposed of them not knowing what was there. The most significant discovery after his death was of Silver Swan Rag, which existed only in piano roll form. The initial copy found in the late 1960s was not properly credited, but once the news was out that it may be a Joplin roll, other copies surfaced with the proper attribution. New information does pop up from time to time, but the bulk of what we know about Joplin's life has likely been found by now, one of the best collections being detailed in King of Ragtime by Dr. Edward Berlin. But many discoveries remain for future generations, perhaps in new ways to interpret his pieces, and perhaps other writings that have not yet surfaced.

Much of the best and most accurate information about Scott Joplin can be found in the well-researched and compelling book King of Ragtime by Dr. Edward Berlin, which can be found on my Books on Ragtime page. If you have any interest in Joplin or ragtime music, then it should be in your library as well Scott Joplin, who was dubbed "The King of Ragtime Writers" early in his composing career, earned the title through diligence, innovation, and sheer talent. Although he was not entirely responsible for helping lower many of the barriers that stood between black composers and success, Joplin was a leader in this regard, if a passive one.

Joe Lamb

Joe Lamb was born of emigrant Irish Catholic parents in Montclair, New Jersey. One of four children of James and Julia Lamb, including older siblings James Jr., Catherine and Annostesia, he was schooled early on by his father in the carpentry trade. At eight, he received some informal lessons, the only real training he ever got from his older sisters who were both promising keyboard instrument players. He also engaged in learning from the popular Etude magazine of the day, which featured many classical works and some light popular pieces.

At the age of thirteen, James Lamb died, and Joe was subsequently sent to St. Jerome's College in Ontario for some engineering training. However, he could not keep the music bug out of his system, and took lessons from a priest at the school. However, these only lasted a few weeks as Joe had ascertained from his previous self-training and the assistance from his sister that the father had little to offer him. He also started composing while in Ontario, having been exposed to some of the German songs frequently performed in Berlin, not far from the school. Most of his early pieces were non-ragtime, but they were published in Toronto under the name of more classical and Germanic sounding Josef F. Lamb during the first few years of the new century. One of the earliest, Muskoka Falls, was started when he was fourteen (finished by the author in 2006), an obvious response to Charles Daniels' enormously popular Hiawatha of 1902. It referred to a recreational resort area for the rich a bit north of Toronto. At one point the dormitory at the school was unavailable for a time, so he boarded at the Walper House in Kitchener, 50 or so miles west of Toronto, about which he wrote one of his earliest rags. Given that his exposure to real ragtime was somewhat limited during his time in Canada, it underscores his musical sensibilities that he was able to turn out a piece of the quality of Walper House Rag, and his 1905 follow-up, Ragged Rapids Rag. Other unusual works included Celestine Waltzes and Lilliputian's Bazaar, which like the others were sold outright to publisher Harry H. Sparks in Toronto, but many such submissions were not published until well after Lamb had left Canada. As was a common practice of the time in an effort to boost the composers listed in a catalog, Lamb was published under at least two other pseudonyms, Harry Moore and Earl West.

After Joe got a job working for a dry goods company in New York City at age 16, he never returned to school. He eventually ended up working for a publishing house in Manhattan, still composing on the side and getting small publication runs. Then came his fateful meeting with his idol, Scott Joplin. Lamb had only recently been exposed to the classic rags of the "King of Ragtime," but quickly took to not only learning them, but emulating them in his own work as well. According to Lamb, he was in the publishing office of John Stark purchasing some of Joplin's more recent works in early 1908. Before leaving, he vocalized his wish to meet the master at some point, and the clerk pointed to a man with one leg wrapped up sitting across the room. "There he is." Lamb was enthralled, and after the accolades of admiration told Joplin that he had been writing ragtime too. So Joplin arranged for Lamb to play the rag for him, Sensation, that evening at a gathering. By the time Lamb finished his performance the room full of Joplin's friends had gone quiet. The Joplin said, "That sounded like a good colored rag," which is exactly what Lamb had wanted to hear. So Joplin arranged to have Sensation published by Stark, who paid the composer $25 with the promise of another $25 after the first thousand copies were sold. A second payment was indeed made a few weeks later, but nothing further for his first true sensation. Just the same, John Stark published pretty much anything Lamb sent him from that point on, even after the publisher retreated back to St Louis a couple of years later.

Joe Lamb is listed in 1910 as living with Catherine and his mother Julia, but his profession is that of a clerk for what is likely music publisher J. Fred Helf. He was first married in 1911, when he moved to Brooklyn from Montclair. Lamb had a ragtime orchestra from around 1906 to 1911, the Clover Imperial Orchestra, which was kept mildly busy during that time playing for small gatherings such as church socials. He also did some arranging for Helf as well, but in addition certainly turned in some of the best ragtime pieces ever written during the 1910's. In 1914 he got a day job with the financing branch of an import business, L.F. Dommerich & Company, and from that point on music was relegated to the status of a serious hobby. Joseph Lamb Junior was born to the couple on July 23 of 1915, around the time of the publication of the ambitious Ragtime Nightingale. The following year saw publication of one his best overall rags. Originally titled Cotton Tail, it was released by Stark as Top Liner Rag to accommodate cover art stock on hand. Lamb would later retool the piece as the richer and refined Cottontail Rag, released in the mid 1960s after his death. His 1917 draft record shows him living in West Brooklyn and employed by Dommerich as a Custom House Clerk, with no mention of him as a composer or musician, Henrietta, died near the end of the great WWI flu pandemic in 1920, leaving him with Joe Junior. In 1919 Stark published the last of the Lamb works that would appear in his catalog, the eclectic Bohemia Rag. For the 1920 Census he is again listed not as a musician, but as a Bank Office Manager for Dommerich. Just the same, Joe was still composing, even if only to follow his own passion.

Lamb married his second wife, Amelia, in 1922. They moved to a house in Brooklyn where he would live for the rest of his life. No longer submitting rags to Stark, he still wrote some rags and songs, but mostly kept them in a folder or trunk at home. Around this time he was contacted to write some novelty piano pieces for Mills Music. One submission, titled Hot Cinders, was ultimately not published until after Lamb's death, but it stands up well to other novelties of the day. Among the other pieces mentioned, but lost at some point in the 1930s, were Ripples, All Wet, Chime In, and Soup and Fish. From around 1928 to 1935, Lamb was regularly involved with minstrel shows presented at St. Edmonds Catholic Church in Brooklyn. While he provided much of the material and participate in rehearsals, he evidently did not perform in these shows. The Lambs are shown in Brooklyn in 1930 as a family of six, including Joe Jr., Patricia, Richard and Robert. He was listed as a manger for an importing firm, which was likely Dommerich.

In 1949 when They All Played Ragtime was being researched, the whereabouts of Lamb were unknown by the authors, Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh. However, Joe Lamb knew right where he was, as did others who read the book which was published in 1950, and he was soon sought out by many ragtime fans, both old and new. Joe retired from his financial career with Dommerich in 1957, a little after the time of his "rediscovery". It was then that he took a number of rags out of mothballs that had been composed from the late 1910s to more recent ones, and played them into a tape recorder on two different occasions for posterity. One session was for the benefit of a young Mike Montgomery who had just come back from Germany with his new reel-to-reel recorder and was warmly welcomed into the Lamb household for an evening concert by the composer. A second significant session, also in his home, was recorded by historian Sam Charters, and released on vinyl in the 1970s. This included some of his best conversations of recollections of the ragtime years. Lamb even performed for his first and only paid professional gig as a soloist at Club 76 in Toronto in late 1959 through the efforts of Bob Darch, John Arpin and others.

After a brief flurry of fame and widespread admiration, Joseph Lamb succumbed to a heart attack at home in 1960. Many of the unpublished rags were finally put into print in 1964, adding to a great legacy of the potential beauty of ragtime realized for all of us, although they have now been out of print since the early 1990s. Fortunately, many other rags and interesting songs spanning his entire career were published, many for the first time, in 2005 through the efforts of his daughter Patricia Lamb-Conn and performer Sue Keller of Ragtime Press in Chicago, followed by Sue's premier recordings of many of these works, and the author's own completion of yet another one of them. Joseph Lamb is clearly never to be forgotten.

In terms of his legacy, Lamb's rags are still among the most played by those who are both discovering ragtime and those who have performed for a lifetime. Running with the best ideas of Joplin, he was able to develop even longer phrases throughout each section, with intricate harmonic balance in his chord progressions, and innovative use of inner melodic lines and complex syncopations as well. That he did so with as little musical training as he had, in addition to having grown up isolated from the mainstream of ragtime output and performance, makes his work all that more extraordinary. Lamb was also able to shape some fine songs and non-ragtime pieces. However, he will best be remembered by his ragtime output, a passion which kept him composing nearly to the end of his life.

I would like to add a personal note of thanks to Lamb's surviving daughter Patricia Lamb-Conn, ragtime performer/publisher Sue Keller and researcher Ted Tjaden, who variously provided additional family information and background along with discoveries and printing of many previously unknown Lamb pieces, some of which were still surfacing in 2008.

James Sylvester Scott

James Sylvester Scott (Jr.) was the only major ragtime composer to grow up in southwestern Missouri, primarily in the Carthage area. Born in Missouri, he was one of six children of former slave James Scott from North Carolina and his younger wife Molly Scott from Texas. James and showed strong musical talent at an early age. His first musical exposure was from his untrained mother, but soon James received some early training in theory and sight-reading from a respected Neosho pianist, as well as private lessons in his teens with a black Carthage music teacher, John Coleman. Perfect pitch and an innate sense of harmony helped speed along his comprehension and training. During a brief period of a year or so when the family lived in Kansas, the only instrument young James had to practice on was a reed organ. When his family moved back to Missouri, his father finally procured a piano. The Scott family was shown living in Neosho, near Carthage, in 1900. Most of his siblings also showed similar musical talent, but did not pursue music as a career. James is listed as a day laborer at age 15. They would soon move to Carthage.

One of Scott's first jobs was as a bootblack for a Carthage barber. At age 16, he obtained one of his first performance jobs at Lakeside Park, a trolley park about halfway between Carthage and Joplin, playing both piano and calliope, and sometimes sitting in on sets performed by other area bands. He was soon working for Dumars Music Store owned by local bandleader Charles Dumars in Carthage, doing cleaning work and picture framing. Mr. Dumars quickly discovered Scott's musical abilities and allowed him to demonstrate tunes, the advent of which brought into the store many curious customers resulting in increased sheet music sales. Dumars eventually helped publish some of Scott's own compositions as well as those co-written with others. During this time James composed some songs and his first three rags. It is notable that Carthage, unlike many local towns, had very few drinking establishments or other forms of adult entertainment. As a result, unlike many other musicians of the time, James did not have to play in saloons or brothels to make a living. In 1904, shortly after the publication of his ragtime tribute to the St. Louis Exposition, On the Pike, Scott shared a concert with John W. "Blind" Boone, who took a liking to the youth, and even played with him some at Dumars during the visit.

In 1906 he met Scott Joplin in St. Louis, who helped arrange the publication of his Frog Legs Rag with John Stark. Joplin may have also had some ancillary affect on James since the complexity and variety of his compositions soon expanded. Frog Legs Rag was enough of a success, second only to Maple Leaf Rag in the catalog that Stark published virtually anything that Scott sent to him over most of the next two decades. It seems that Joplin and Scott met only once or twice, and did not have any evident ongoing relationship once Joplin moved to New York City. James also formed the Carthage Jubilee Singers which did local concerts, and played for the movies at the Delphus Theater in town. There is a chance that during this period he may have been acquainted with fellow Carthage white composer Clarence Woods, as they had taken from the same piano teacher, and Woods also played for movies and local concerts until he moved to Texas for a while.

It was also in 1906, with the income from his Dumars job and his rags, that James bought a house in Carthage and married Miss Nora Johnson (or Norah). The couple never had children. While John Stark was off in New York City from 1906 to 1910, Scott continued to submit consistently fine pieces to him, most of which were quickly published. He is listed in Carthage in 1910 as a musician and piano salesman by trade. Scott continued to work for Dumars until 1914 before turning to performing and teaching full time. In 1918 he and Norah moved to Kansas City, Missouri, then later a bit west to Kansas City, Kansas, where he would spend the rest of his life. Most of his work was actually on the Missouri side of Kansas City. In 1920 he is listed as a theater musician, and Norah as an entertainment cateress. Scott taught piano in a studio he set up in Kansas City, and soon purchased a grand piano, which he said was his most prized possession. He played in some of the movie houses for a time as a soloist, in particular at a long-term position at the Panama Theater. Scott later worked with a seven-piece band that he formed, writing most of the arrangements, and sometimes accompanying local blues singer Ada Brown, a cousin of his. Due to his diminutive height (5'4") and musical vigor, he was referred to as "the little professor."

The increasing complexity of Scott's later rags demonstrate his considerable pianistic skills. His love of the genre was clearly demonstrated in one of his last published rags, Don't Jazz Me, (I'm Music), although that rag, like most of his pieces submitted without titles, was likely named by John Stark or his staff. Stark in particular was frustrated with the onslaught of loose (by the standards of that time period) jazz music, and the title of this ironically somewhat jazzy piece was one of his final editorials on the passing of classic ragtime. A steady playing job at the black-owned Eblon Theater with his band was sidelined by economic troubles, but he was able to retain his position when the band was replaced by a theater organ, as Scott was also quite capable at that instrument. In 1930 Scott's wife died, as did a continuing career playing for the movies due to the advent of synchronized sound films. Towards the end of his life he was in continuously poor health, but kept composing, and moving, reportedly living in four residences between 1931 and 1938. Until 1936 his primary income was from teaching. He finally succumbed to kidney failure in 1938. Some of his final works remain unpublished or even undiscovered.

Ragtime performer and promoter Bob Darch told of his efforts to find Scott's burial place in the 1950s, which included a mild alcoholic bribe to the groundskeeper, only to find the cemetery overgrown, Scott's spot poorly marked, and in overall sad condition. Since then many Kansas City rag enthusiasts made an effort to honor their adopted composer with a new headstone, and his site is now well kept and often visited. Fortunately ragtime did not die with him, and the vivacity of James Scott pieces will long be enjoyed by new generations of rag enthusiasts.

It should be noted that the author's family was long based in Carthage, and grandfather Paul Scroggs had some memory of hearing ragtime played there in his youth. Some of the research on Scott was done on site in the 1980s and 1990s during family visits to Carthage and Jasper Missouri.

Charles L. Johnson

Charles L. Johnson was born in Wyandotte, Kansas to James R. Johnson and Helen Elizabeth Johnson. Census records and his 1917 Draft card show him a year older than the commonly published 1876 date suggests, as does his WWI draft card. So he was most likely born in 1875 as the 1900 Census and his Draft card specifically claim. In 1880, James is shown to be a fisherman, and his wife a housekeeper. Wyandotte was eventually incorporated into Kansas City, so Kansas City, Kansa is considered his birthplace by default.

Charlie was attracted to the piano at a very early age, and his natural abilities encouraged his parents to buy him a piano when he was nine. He took formal study in classical music until his early teens, when popular music tugged at him continually. While studying Beethoven, little Charlie was also playing the hits of the day on the sly. This did not serve him well when his teacher, a Mr. Kreiser, became frustrated by these non-classical piano styling, so Charlie quit. Johnson continued to learn, though, taking courses to better ground him in music theory and compositional skills, as well as picking up the banjo, guitar, violin, and mandolin, enabling him to play with small groups.

Johnson lived his entire life in Kansas City, mostly on the Missouri side, which was the center of a great deal of ragtime activity. His earliest tunes were performed with small ensembles, but not published except for a handful. Working as a piano and music demonstrator for the J. W. Jenkins & Sons Company in Kansas City, Charles managed to get his foot in the composition door with a rag, Scandalous Thompson, published by Jenkins in 1899. This was closely followed by Doc Brown's Cake Walk the same year, a piece allegedly based on a local character who is pictured on the cover. Jenkins managed to get an arrangement of this to John Philip Sousa when he was in town, and that performance helped to make it fairly popular. He continued to get published, with a few songs and incidental piano solos appearing over the next couple of years. Johnson's first business cards and magazine advertisements indicate that he was in the music arrangement and commissioned composition business, in which he met limited success in the early years.

Charles Johnson was married around 1901 to Sylvia (Hoskin) Johnson, and they soon had a daughter, Frances. In 1902, the Carl Hoffman firm for which he was now working published A Black Smoke, one of his more interesting folk rags. In 1905 he attempted to counter the popularity of his friend and fellow Kansas City composer Charles N. Daniels 1902 hit Hiawatha with a similar intermezzo of his own. Iola did do quite well, and the following year it was also made into a song as Hiawatha had been. Both pieces were named after towns in Kansas, not after Native American names or cultures, but the towns had got their names in that way so there was an indirect linkage. Iola became a point of controversy over three decades later in 1940 with the publication and recording of a big band piece called Playmates, much of which sounded very suspiciously like Johnson's tune. While some may have forgotten the piece by that time, the composer had not, and with current copyright owner Jerry Vogel he did battle against the Santly-Joy company which owned Playmates. By 1944, Johnson and Vogel received a settlement.

It was in 1906 as Iola had lyrics added that Johnson came up with his biggest rag hit, Dill Pickles, featuring the now ubiquitous three over four ragtime pattern later used throughout Tin Pan Alley. It was allegedly named quite by happenstance, when another employee in the building asked him what he was working on. Johnson saw the employee’s dinner in his hand, including a dill pickle, and decided that would be the name of the piece. From that point on, Johnson's output was quite remarkable in terms of both volume and quality as well as commercial viability. It was just one of four of his rags which reportedly sold over a million copies each during his lifetime.

The success of Dill Pickles helped to both encourage and fund Johnson's entry into running his publishing firm. Because of the number of rags, songs, intermezzos, and other publications he put out, Charlie used the pseudonyms Raymond Birch, Herbert Leslie and Eugene Ballard from time to time so as to not "flood the market" with his own works. At one point, when he sold his firm for a tidy sum to the Harold Rossiter organization, it was on the condition that he not enter the publishing business again for at least one year. But with his output and reputation, Johnson had no trouble getting published by other music houses during that time. He also worked both free-lance and on retainer as an arranger during the ragtime era, and there are many more pieces than we may ever know of that he was responsible for putting in print.

Many of Johnson's own rags after 1906 utilized the secondary rag, or three over four pattern he had first used in Dill Pickles. Since they were generally easy to play and memorize, his products sold briskly. Simplicity worked well for his style, and he was widely regarded for his work by many fledgling composers who asked him for advice or even sent in works for Charlie to arrange. But he was also admired for his versatility. Johnson was just as adept at turning out a ballad or intermezzo as a popular rag. Later works in the mid-1910s leaned towards dance tunes, and even rags often had a lightly or non-syncopated fox-trot trio. There is obviously a lot of joy in his music, and he reportedly lived the same way.

The majority of his compositions from mid-1912 on were published by Forster Music, as he retired from the publishing business at that point. In 1910 he was shown living still with Sylvia, but their daughter does not appear. Hs 1918 draft card shows him again as music publisher, but employed by the Jack Riley Orchestra. It also implies he was no longer married at this time, as his mother is listed as his nearest relative and no wife shown. One of his biggest hits came in 1919 with Sweet and Low, a song that reportedly earned him $30,000 while in print.

It is noteworthy that while Johnson rarely published works by other composers, many that he did were composed by women. In a somewhat competitive market with two other big publishers in town, Johnson did see that any worthy submission got its due in something more than a vanity publication. These include Kate Myers Stith, Enola Kempka, Elva Tarlton, Maude Muller Gilmore, Lucy B. Phillips, Frances Cox and Ethel May Earnist, the last of which was thought to be one of his pen names for many years. Later business was referred largely to Forster, so in that regard we cannot be absolutely sure how many composers of either gender he sent their way, or even to rival Jenkins & Sons in Kansas City. Even more remarkable is how maintained viable competition for the Tin Pan Alley composers of New York City, as well as popular Chicago composers, all from his headquarters in Kansas City.

Charlie married again in the 1920's to Eva Johnson, and spent much of the rest of his life peripherally active in music while officially in retirement. The 1930 census shows him still as a music composer, and living with his wife and mother. That same year, after more than three decades of composing, saw another relative success with a recording of his Jubilee in the Sky by Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. Among Johnson's best friends in his later years were the Forsters who the couple socialized with often. In Kansas City he was active for many years with an annual event called the Nit Wit Show run by the University Club. Finally in 1941 he joined ASCAP more than two decades after it was founded, adding him to the ranks of other famous Tin Pan Alley composers who had started the organization. Johnson also continued to write and arrange, with some of his arrangements done for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. It was discovered after his death that he had written a great deal more material that had not been published, some of it perhaps written into the late 1940s. Charlie died peacefully just three weeks after his 75th birthday, and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery.

May Frances Aufderheide

May Frances Aufderheide was born into a somewhat musical family in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was born to John Henry Aufderheide, a capable violinist who chose a career in banking, and Lucy M. (Deel) Aufderheide. Some sources report varying years of birth, but the 1900 Census is fairly specific with an 1888 date, which aligns fairly well with the ages given in 1920 and 1930. John's sister May Kolmer was a talented pianist who had played public concerts with the Indianapolis Symphony, later teaching at the Metropolitan School of Music. May Frances took classical piano lessons from her aunt while in her teens, but always felt a lure to ragtime and popular music. It was likely when she was attending finishing school in the east that she set some rags down to paper. When she returned around early 1908 May was determined to have one of her pieces published. With the help of young sign painter named Duane Crabb, who drew a cover and arranged the printing, and one his friends, future composer Paul Pratt who did the musical arrangement and engraving, Dusty Rag was released.

Crabb did not have the capability of distributing the piece beyond the boundaries of urban Indianapolis, and while May was touring Europe (as all refined girls from well-to-do families must), Dusty Rag was initially gathering dust in local music stores. Upon her return in 1908 she married young architect Thomas M. Kaufman on March 25 and they settled to the eastern part of the state in Richmond by year's end. Her desire must have been compounded when her cousin Frieda Aufderheide had The Flyer Rag published. May's father saw that she was determined to write, and spurred on in part by her ability to publish a rag on her own and by growing sales of Dusty Rag, he formed J.H. Aufderheide & Company to publish her works. John bought the Dusty Rag copyright and reissued it under his label along with her Richmond Rag. Hiring Paul Pratt to manage the enterprise, it was successful enough to garner column space in the American Musician and Art Journal in the summer of 1909. They touted May Frances as a composer with a future, noted her two pieces that were currently in demand, and told of two more that were sure to be hits. They were Buzzer Rag and The Thriller, the latter which would become her best known work.

The Aufderheide company published other works not only by Paul Pratt, but two of May's acquaintances, Gladys Yelvington and Julia Lee Niebergall. May and her husband moved back to Indianapolis in 1911 in part because of his inability to retain work in the architecture field, and to live in a place where he had better income prospects. It was during that time that she finished her last published piano rag, Novelty Rag. The only issue from the Aufderheide company in 1912 was a song version of Dusty Rag which did not fare well. Mr. Kaufman eventually ended up working for John in the banking business as a broker, and his marriage to May reportedly remained strained in spite of financial security. In 1920 she is shown as having no occupation, not even teaching music. In 1922 the couple adopted a daughter, Lucy Kaufmann. The 1930 Census shows Thomas as an investment broker during a difficult time for that occupation. May quit playing altogether by the 1930s, and the family eventually moved to California in the late 1940s. In the 1950s Mrs. Kaufman became wheelchair bound due to arthritis, and remained so until her death. Thomas died in late 1960, and she lived in Pasadena, California another 12 years until her death. To this day, May Aufderheide's rags remain among the most popular of those composed by women.

Julius Lenzberg

Julius Lenzberg was born in Baltimore, Maryland to German immigrants Henry and Julia Lenzberg, the youngest of six girls and three boys in the family. His father was employed as a cigar packer when Julius was young. One of a considerable pool of talented composers from Baltimore, Lenzberg was classically grounded with an ear for melody. In 1900, having already locally published two marches, he was listed as a musician in Baltimore, although still living with his parents and some of his older siblings. By 1910 he was married to Ella Lenzberg and made his home in Manhattan, shown there as a traveling musician. This was also his most productive period as a composer, submitting many clever rags that reflected his classical background and taste for whimsy and stage presentation. While not huge sellers, with the exception of Hungarian Rag, they provided a comfortable supplemental income for the couple.

In the mid 1910s the Lenzbergs had moved into a home in Queens, where he lived the rest of his life. On his 1918 draft record he listed his occupation as Orchestra Leader. By 1920, Julius was working with the Keith Theater Company, one of the few remaining Vaudeville chains. He also recorded a fairly good number of dance tunes with his Riverside Orchestra starting in 1919, largely for the Edison and Pathé labels. Lenzberg's father had died by 1920, and his mother and his sister Florence moved in with him. He and his wife evidently never had children. During the Great Depression from the late 1920s through the 1930s he was still directly involved with music directing stage orchestras. Lenzberg even recorded with a group named Julius Lenzberg's Harmonists on the Okeh label, and with Julius Lenzberg and His Orchestra. He eventually moved into management, away from the grind of preparing musical presentations on a weekly basis. Lenzberg's employer in 1942 was Select Operating Corporation, a theatrical management and property broker that included the Shubert Organization. Data beyond this point to his death is difficult to find.

Lenzberg's hits during the ragtime era were few but noteworthy. One of his great talents was adapting well-known classical tunes to piano ragtime format. Among these are his Hungarian Rag and Operatic Rag. They helped fuel a trend in which rag composers such as George L. Cobb and Felix Arndt, as well as various performers, ragged famous tunes, often to the detriment of both the original and arranging composers. Mr. Lenzberg's arrangements are actually fresh and innovative in their use of these themes, unlike many similar yet lesser attempts. His Haunting Rag is among the most original of his works. Lenzberg also co-composed a rag with the esteemed ballad writer Ernest R. Ball.

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