When one thinks of ragtime, one thinks of Scott Joplin, a pioneering African American musician and composer. Ragtime is a lively, melodic style of music that, at the turn of the twentieth century, was acknowledged as fresh and uniquely American. At the time, it was labeled "the folk music of the American city," and Joplin was famed as the "King of Ragtime Writers."

While growing up in Texas amidst a family of sharecroppers, Joplin heard—and was influenced by—African American work songs and spirituals as well as European waltzes and marches. He began playing the piano and studied music with a German-born teacher, from whom he learned the manner in which European musical compositions were structured. He blended all of these influences into his own rhythmically adventurous brand of music, which he began performing while still an adolescent. In the 1890s, he found...