Dancing to a Black Man's Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin;
Susan Curtis; University of Missouri Press (2004)
Scott Joplin (c. 1867-1917) was an African-American composer and pianist of ragtime and classical music. He is profiled at AfriClassical.com, which relies extensively on an authoritative biography, Dancing
to a Black Man's Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin, written by
Susan Curtis and published in 2004 by the University of Missouri
Press. Susan Curtis is Professor of History and American
Studies at Purdue University.
AfriClassical has invited Prof. Curtis to comment on the latest version of the Scott Joplin page at the website. She has replied, in part:
"Dear Mr. Zick,
I have visited your website several times and I’m deeply honored to have my work on Scott Joplin featured so prominently." "As the Maxwell C. Weiner Visiting Distinguished Professor of the
Humanities at Missouri University of Science and Technology for this
semester,
I will be giving a couple of public lectures, one of which will be
about Scott Joplin...a version of that talk is attached. If it seems suitable for your Joplin blog, I would like very much to have you post it.
Here’s wishing you all the best,
Susan Curtis"
“Scott Joplin’s Interview a Century Later: Composing an African American Cultural Legacy
First Weiner Public Lecture, Rolla, MO, April 15, 2013
Susan Curtis
In April 1913,
almost exactly a century ago, the New York Age published an
interview with Scott Joplin, the great African American composer of
ragtime music. It is, to my knowledge, the only interview with
Joplin that is extant today. It appeared in a prominent black weekly
that enjoyed a national readership and on a page edited by a noted
music and drama critic, Lester A. Walton. The interview is short—in
essence, Joplin claims significance for the music he had written and
advanced as well as frustration with the fact that his music has been
misunderstood. It invites us, a century later, to reflect on Scott
Joplin’s musical legacy as a revealing moment in U.S. history.
But I want to
suggest something more. That is, there’s something more than a
century anniversary of an episode in the life of an American composer
at stake here. We must remember that the Scott Joplin we honor today
was, for decades, forgotten—relegated to the unimportant selvages
of the fabric of American culture. When we listen to his words
today, we must apprehend the limited audience that encountered them
in 1913. Thus, the point of this meditation is twofold. First, I
want to share with you what Joplin had to say about the musical genre
with which his name is associated and to explore why his work
appeared in the New York Age at that particular moment.
Second, I want to think about the high price we, as a society, have
paid for not hearing him in the first place. Taken together, I hope
these two pieces will help us see how and why history matters.
I. Scott Joplin
and Classic Ragtime
It is not entirely
clear to me why Lester Walton decided to make Joplin’s words the
lead story in his “Theatrical Comment” on April 3, 1913. As far
as I can tell, Walton and Joplin had a vexed relationship with one
another. The two knew each other in St. Louis in the early
1900s—they both spent time at Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Café and
claimed many of the same friends. Walton was a native son of the
Mound City, having been born there in 1879. He graduated from Sumner
High School in 1897, and in 1902, Walton began working as a reporter
for the St. Louis Star, covering both the four courts and the
golf beat. Joplin, of course, was not a native Missourian, but he
had lived in the state since 1893 when he moved to Sedalia after
having been in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Joplin
had obtained a patchy education as a youngster in Texarkana, but he
took at least some courses on music at the George R. Smith College
for Negroes in Sedalia before moving to St. Louis in late 1900 or
early 1901. Joplin and Walton left St. Louis at about the same time,
too—both seeking their fortunes in New York City in the field of
entertainment.1
In spite of these
shared experiences and common ties to St. Louis, there is little
evidence of a friendship between them, even though they traveled in
some of the same circles in their new home. Walton was one of the
founders and officers of the Colored Vaudevillian Benevolent
Association (C.V.B.A.); Joplin became a member and took an active
part in C.V.B.A.—sponsored events.2
Walton achieved a position of considerable influence as the drama
critic and editor of a popular page called initially “Music and the
Stage” shortly after his arrival in the city. Except for a few
brief notices, however, he rarely touted Joplin’s talent as a
composer. Indeed, before publishing the interview with Joplin,
Walton promoted other musicians much more enthusiastically than his
fellow St. Louisan. For some reason, Walton kept Joplin at arm’s
length.
In 1913, however,
Walton shone the spotlight on Scott Joplin. He entitled the segment,
“Detriment to Ragtime,” and opened the piece with the observation
that “There is no harm in musical sounds”—regardless of whether
they came from an up-tempo piece of ragtime or a slow melodic song.
He then turned the next paragraphs over to Joplin, whom he described
as “one of the world’s greatest writers of ragtime.” Joplin’s
comments disparaged musicians who wrote tasteless lyrics for their
otherwise beautiful pieces of music, and he argued that objections to
ragtime music more often than not stemmed from “vulgar words”
rather than from the music itself.
In the remaining
paragraphs devoted to his comments, Joplin made two claims that form
the basis of the legacy he sought to compose for himself. The first
was to establish ragtime as a distinctly African American musical
genre. “Ragtime rhythm,” he insisted, “is a syncopation
original with the colored people though many of them are ashamed of
it. But the other races throughout the world are learning to write
and make use of ragtime melodies.”3
Attribution of ragtime to African Americans had been common about a
decade earlier, although the associations made by white writers for
The Etude and Grove’s Dictionary of Music were not
particularly flattering.4
Joplin’s desire to establish African American origins for ragtime
must be seen in response to an increasing detachment of African
Americans from the music in the mainstream press. In a classic case
of what Eric Lott called “love and theft,” Irving Berlin and
Louis Hirsch—not Scott Joplin—were touted as the standard-bearers
for American ragtime music.5
Here, Joplin took pleasure in the fact that “other races” had
been inspired by the genius of composers of African descent, like
himself, but he did not wish to surrender originality to those who
had followed. At the same time, Joplin felt compelled to acknowledge
and explain criticism of ragtime that had come from African
Americans. He likely still remembered the harsh denunciations of
ragtime like the one that appeared in The Negro Music Journal
in 1903, which called ragtime a “low and degrading class of
music.”6
Instead of a reason for race pride, the writer no doubt recoiled
from music written by African Americans that was widely condemned by
white, middle-class arbiters of American culture. In 1913, Joplin
sought to reclaim credit for the musical innovation and to
distance himself from some lyrics that had dragged down the race.
Beyond claiming
credit for a form of which “white people took no notice” until
about 1893, Joplin also linked his musical efforts to classical
music. He wrote: “If some one were to put vulgar words to a
strain of one of Beethoven’s Symphonies, people would begin saying,
‘I don’t like Beethoven’s Symphonies.’ So it is the
unwholesome words and not the ragtime melodies that many people
hate.”7
Joplin claimed classical status indirectly by comparing his music
with that of Beethoven. Such a move was, unfortunately, necessary
because of Joplin’s limited success in promoting his serious work.
His great triumph, of course, was the completion of an opera,
Treemonisha, in 1911. An anonymous reviewer for The
American Musician asserted that Joplin had “created an entirely
new phase of musical art and ha[d] produced a thoroughly American
opera, dealing with a typical American subject, yet free from all
extraneous influence.” The reviewer saw Joplin as an heir to
Antonin Dvorak’s daring effort to incorporate African American
musical riffs in New World Symphony, and he considered the
composer to be for African American music what Booker T. Washington
and Paul Laurence Dunbar were for African American letters.8
Two years later, however, Joplin still sought a financial backer
and producer willing to stage what the reviewer had called an
“interesting and potent achievement.”
Joplin had faced
similar problems ten years earlier when he completed his first opera,
A Guest of Honor, which likely dramatized Booker T.
Washington’s formal invitation to dinner at the White House with
Theodore Roosevelt in the spring of 1902. Joplin had the music, the
book, actors, and a venue, but he failed to secure the necessary
financial backing to present the opera to the public.9
At about the same time, Joplin finished an extraordinary ballet
making use of syncopated music and popular dances. He called the
work The Ragtime Dance. John Stark, the publisher who had
dubbed Joplin “The King of Ragtime Writers,” refused to publish
it. Stark’s refusal does not necessarily mean that he failed to
see the large vision displayed by Joplin; rather, he rightly could
not imagine his customers knowing what to make of the work as a piece
of sheet music. Stark’s daughter Nellie pressured him to publish
the piece, but without the whole concept—music and staged dance—it
made little sense to Stark’s clientele, and the poor sales
confirmed for Stark that Joplin’s value to him lay exclusively in
strictly instrumental numbers that could be marketed as “classic
ragtime.”10
Stark was not alone
in seeing the classical elements in Joplin’s work. Alfred Ernst and
Monroe Rosenfeld saw great potential in Joplin’s early
compositions. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported that
Ernst had invited Joplin to accompany him on a European tour so that
he could learn more about “compositions of a higher class.” Two
years later, Rosenfeld endorsed Joplin as the “King of Ragtime
Writers” who eventually would reach his full potential when he
turned from popular music to opera.11
John Stark advertised Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag as the
product of a composer with “the skill of a Beethoven” combined
with the “sentiment of a Black Mamma’s croon.”12
In the two years following Joplin’s New York Age interview,
Stark published lengthy advertisements in Christensen’s Ragtime
Review that equated ragtime with classical music. As he wrote of
Joplin’s compositions in 1915, “We have advertised these as
classic rags, and we mean just what we say. . . . They have lifted
ragtime from its low estate and lined it up with Beethoven and
Bach.”13
Except for these
fleeting moments of praise and respect, Joplin never achieved fame as
a classical American composer during his lifetime. Clearly, this
interview, however much it might have meant to the composer, did
nothing to alter the musical hierarchy of 1913. He had written two
operas, an ambitious modern ballet, and a score of more accessible
pieces ranging in form from waltzes and marches to two-steps and slow
drags. Joplin had gathered around him a group of talented students
who had collaborated with him and had published compositions of their
own. But in New York, he still seemed to be looking for his niche.
And whatever he thought Walton might do for him, Joplin knew that his
fellow St. Louisan had been fickle up to this point. While The
American Musician had published a full-blown review of his opera,
Walton had published a disappointing notice under the promising
title, “Latest Negro Opera.”14
And although Walton was one of the founding members of the “Frogs,”
a social organization of African American performers devoted to
preserving the best of African American thought and expression,
Joplin never appeared in any of the articles about the group’s
activities.
So what might have
made Walton “interview” a composer who, for reasons unknown to us
today, triggered such ambivalence? Like so much of what we know of
both the composer and the critic, Walton’s decision to print an
interview with Joplin is shrouded in mystery. Nevertheless, a number
of events immediately preceding and following the interview provide a
context within which we can speculate. But at this point, we must
broaden the frame from Joplin to survey the prevailing conditions for
African American artists and performers in 1913. In doing so, we
enter Walton’s world.
II. Walton’s
World
Few individuals had
as great a shaping influence on the world of African American art and
performance in the early twentieth century as Lester A. Walton. He
occupied a curious insider/outsider position as critic and editor, on
one hand, and leader of and participant in the performance community,
on the other. At a time when George Jean Nathan, the witty drama
critic for H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set, was establishing what
would become the standard for American drama criticism, Walton was
developing a very different kind of relationship between the critic
and the performer. Unlike Nathan and his followers, who took
pleasure in withering comments directed at actors, playwrights, and
directors and self-aggrandizing displays of knowledge and
sophistication, Walton sought the tone of an educator. Make no
mistake, Walton could find fault with the best of them, skewering
performers for excessive staginess, criticizing singers for ragged
entries, and pommeling playwrights for questionable dialogue. But he
also always used his columns to comment on the political or social
value of the stage in breaking down racial prejudice and
misunderstanding. He devoted columns to exploring individual
performers’ keys to success, to penning inspiring biographies, and
to offering insights into standard business practices to readers who
most likely had limited access to education. On occasion, he turned
the columns over to performers, professionals in the community, and
clergymen so as to give them a platform from which to address a wider
audience than they typically reached. And Walton frequently printed
excerpts from other newspapers to keep his readers apprised of
contemporary (usually white) attitudes toward African American
performers and culture.15
In the weeks
leading up to Joplin’s interview, Walton devoted much of his
attention to the founding of a “colored stock company” at the
Lafayette Theater in Harlem. Whispers began in late February that
plans were in the works, and by early March it looked to be a done
deal. Walton discussed the group before it ever appeared on the
stage: “The debut of the colored stock company at the Lafayette
Theatre is full of significance and means much to the colored
theatrical professions, yes far more than it does to the owners of
the theatre. It is, therefore, incumbent on all parties concerned to
put their shoulder to the wheel to make the company’s appearance a
big success.”16
He announced with delight that “Will Marion Cook, the foremost
musician of the race” would essentially serve as conductor and
musical director of the company. The larger significance of this
venture was, for Walton, a re-energizing of African American
performance in the wake of the deaths of prominent black stars like
Ernest Hogan and George Walker. It was a chance to bring an African
American perspective back to the American stage.
But as Walton well
knew, racial discrimination on the stage in the United States meant
that African American actors were left to their own devices to learn
how to act or sing or dance or write stage plays. The deeper
significance of the stock company was to provide experience for
talented performers that they would never get in mainstream theaters.
He let Cook himself explain how this issue animated the company:
“The founders of this organization aim to put into characteristic,
a musical and dramatic form, real pictures of Negro life both of city
and plantation. The authors of the playlets will at first treat of
the lighter humorous characteristics of their people until Negro
actors shall have obtained a surer stage technique. The Negro talent
for music and dramatic expression is now unquestioned. The Negro
Players hope to aid in the development and perfection of this
talent.”17
No one understood the importance of this experience better than
Cook. He had studied at the Oberlin Conservatory as a teenager,
spent two years studying with a violin master in Berlin, and
eventually entered the National
Conservatory of Music in Washington, D. C., where he coincided with
Antonin Dvořák. Cook was one of the students who influenced the
great composer to interweave African American motifs into his New
World Symphony. In spite of having earned stellar credentials
like these, Cook could not find steady employment as a musician in
organizations that were dominated by whites. Although he had enjoyed
the benefits of instruction from some of the finest musicians of his
day, Cook recognized that being barred from white orchestras,
ensembles, and stages meant that continued development would depend
on a community of artists and performers who, though extremely
talented, did not enjoy the imprimatur of the so-called legitimate
stage.18
Before the month of
March was out, the Negro Players had made a successful debut, enjoyed
a one-week run, and disbanded. Walton opined that the problem was
that the lack of business managers in the Black community meant that
the actors and musicians tried to do everything—including making
decisions they were not qualified to make. Without saying so
explicitly, Walton pointed to the impact of racial discrimination on
the efforts of black performers to succeed. The simple fact remained
that there was not enough money in African American theater to
support the hiring of business managers.19
Thus, by the time Joplin’s interview appeared in the newspaper,
Walton had been thinking a great deal about the future prospects of
African American talent in the United States. After being in the
thick of things in Harlem for five years, Walton had to have been
discouraged by the outcomes even as he could see the talent all
around him. The problem did not lie in meager ability; rather,
obstacles structured by racism thwarted African American endeavors.
It was in this
context that Walton launched what ended up being a decades-long
campaign to standardize the capitalization of Negro in the American
press. He sent a letter to the members of the Associated Press on
March 21, 1913, asking that this group consider treating Negro not as
a color but as a racial designation on a par with Indian, Japanese,
or Italian and capitalizing it as a symbol of equality and respect.
No term in current use, he argued captured the sense of peoplehood
felt by African Americans—they were not the only “colored”
people; they were not all “black;” those living in the United
States were not “African.” Yet as a group they wanted a
descriptor that represented an identity of which to be proud. “Why
not refer to the term ‘Negro’ as a race of people and not with
regard to the color of one’s skin?” he asked.20
The request was, not surprisingly, denied, but, undaunted, Walton
began writing letters to the editor of the New York Times to
expose the faulty logic of racism. He also initiated a
behind-the-scenes effort to persuade influential editors, one at a
time, to drop the use of insulting terms like “darkey” and
quietly introduce the practice of capitalizing Negro. The New
York World under the editorial leadership of Herbert Bayard Swope
was one of the first to adopt the practice, but it would not be until
sometime during World War II that it was considered standard practice
among American newspapermen.21
In 1913, the recent inauguration of Woodrow Wilson as President of
the United States lent a sense of urgency to Walton’s campaign.
For now, in March 1913, the man who held the highest office in the
land had begun the work of segregating the nation’s capital. Few
presidents since Lincoln had done that much for the cause of racial
equality, but Wilson’s actions threatened to erase even the small
gains that had been made since the end of Reconstruction.22
So when Walton
decided to publish an interview with Scott Joplin, he was thinking a
great deal about the social diminishment of African-descended people
in the United States. Perhaps Walton decided it was time to give
Joplin his due as a serious composer, because in spite of the
positive review in The American Musician Joplin still lacked
the support needed to stage his opera. Walton had written in late
October 1912 that since “the race question is only incidental to
our white writers,” it fell to “writers of color” to speak up
for the artists of the race.23
If he, Walton, did not give Joplin a platform for expressing his
ideas about his compositions, who would?
Nevertheless, in
spite of giving Joplin a chance to speak to the readers of the Age,
Walton could do little to get his opera on the stage. Four years
later—almost to the day—Joplin died in a ward for the mentally
ill, never having succeeded in bringing Treemonisha to the
world with proper sets, costumes, and musical accompaniment.
Although his death made the front page of the New York Age, it
was not long before Joplin faded from the memory of Americans—black
and white. Indeed, he was unfortunately mis-remembered as the
composer of dance-hall music by James Weldon Johnson and completely
ignored by W. E. B. Du Bois in his Gift of the Black Folk, which
catalogued the intellectual and artistic contributions to American
life made by African Americans. His wife, Lottie Stokes Joplin,
lobbied the African American entertainment community unsuccessfully
for years to raise money to buy a headstone to mark his grave. But
Joplin remained in obscurity for more than five decades after his
death and even when his work resurfaced, it took time for his musical
genius to be fully appreciated. It is to the high cost of this
forgetting that I would like now to turn.
III. The High
Price of Forgetting
Now that Scott
Joplin has been remembered as the King of Ragtime and many of his
compositions are immediately recognizable, it is easy to trick
ourselves into believing that Americans always recognized his
genius. It reminds me of what Nikhil Pal Singh wrote of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., in his magisterial work, Black Is a Country:
“The triumph of the civil rights movement under King’s
leadership is now said to reveal certain truths about the nation and
how its values of tolerance and inclusive boundaries have been
reconstituted in our own time. . . . As a new founding father, the
mythic King allowed Americans not only to celebrate their progress
into a more inclusive and tolerant people, but also to tell
themselves that this is who they always were.”24
The trick is to suppress the most radical aspects of King’s vision
and to ignore the violence of his contemporaries’ response to even
his most modest demands for equal treatment and respect. One of the
musicians responsible for the Joplin revival in the 1970s, T. J.
Anderson reported with refreshing honesty in 1973 that he had not
always taken the author of Treemonisha seriously. He writes:
“My attitude toward Joplin is not the same as it was thirty years
ago. We see him now as one of the most important creators of his
generation, certainly comparable to Schoenberg. Yet most people knew
nothing about Joplin when he was alive—other than as a composer of
rags.”25
So, in point of
fact, Americans have not always recognized Joplin’s musical
gifts, and as a society we have paid a high price for that failure.
If it were only Joplin who had slipped through the cracks of our
collective memory—tragic though that would be—the loss would not
have been so keenly felt. But you probably noticed that in the space
of this short lecture, I have mentioned several individuals whose
talents were not used to the fullest. Will Marion Cook languished in
third-rate venues in spite of his first-rate training and ability.
Lester A. Walton carved out a socially responsible form of drama
criticism that was ignored by the mainstream of drama critics. His
great campaign to get U.S. newspapers to capitalize the word “Negro”
eventually succeeded but the accomplishment was attributed
incorrectly to “Lester Watson.”26
Joplin, Cook, and Walton represent the tip of the proverbial iceberg
of African-descended Americans whose talents their countrymen
squandered because of racial discrimination in the form of personal
bigotry and institutional racism.
Today, leaders at most American universities and corporations wring
their hands over the matter of diversity and inclusion. Their goal
is to create an environment in which everyone is welcome and
respected, and they periodically have to shake their heads in
disbelief when this ideal is shattered—once again—by overt signs
of disrespect and exclusion. I doubt that there is a single
institution in the United States that has succeeded in reaching this
goal. At my home institution, Purdue University, the campus
community is frequently rocked by incidents such as the defacement of
a memorial portrait of an African American professor in the Business
school just last year. “How can incidents like these still
happen?” they ask. “Haven’t we gotten past such racist
displays?”
I’d like to
suggest that our nation’s on-going struggle with race is another
part of the high price we pay for our history of forgetting or only
partially remembering the extraordinary men and women whose desire to
be “co-workers in the kingdom of culture,” as W. E. B. Du Bois so
eloquently put it, was spurned by the mainstream majority. The
reason it is important to review Scott Joplin’s interview a century
later is to listen—carefully—to what he had to say and to
think—carefully—about what we obviously missed in the first
instance. Indeed, instead of thinking of Joplin as being just like
his contemporaries, I propose that we recognize that he was
attempting to write music that exceeded the conventions for serious
composition.
At the heart of
Joplin’s message is his laying claim to the status of a serious
composer. His point of reference was Ludwig van Beethoven, not Louis
Hirsch or Irving Berlin. His contemporaries found it hard to
register Joplin’s music as “serious,” because he wasn’t using
meter, melody, and rhythm the way white serious composers used them.
Nor did he experiment with musical conventions in the way such
serious renegades as Arnold Schoenberg did with atonality and
dissonance. In other words the canon and the standards of value did
not accommodate the avant garde conceptions of opera and ballet
offered by Joplin.
The same might well
be said of other African American or non-white artists,
intellectuals, poets, performers, writers, and educators. For
example, at the moment that George Jean Nathan and Lester Walton set
out to establish particular traditions of drama criticism, no such
standards yet existed. It quickly became clear that Nathan’s
approach—wicked, witty, and world-weary—would emerge as the
standard by which all criticism should be judged. As a recent
biographer put it: “Nathan was more than a recorder of Broadway’s
brilliance; he was himself one of its baubles. Nathan came to
personify the Broadway critic: elegantly dressed, escorting a
fetching ingénue toward two on the aisle, row E seats; midnight
suppers at the Stork Club; playwrights and directors breathlessly
watching his every sneer or smile; gossip columnists eagerly relating
his latest bon mots and evening escapades. Nathan flourished during
Broadway’s most glamorous era.”27
I probably needn’t mention that no matter whether Walton had
wanted to emulate Nathan, he never could have purchased “two
on the aisle, Row E seats” nor could he have gained admission to
the Stork Club. But even that raw racial discrimination is not the
point; the point is that there was but one way of measuring
excellence in the field of drama criticism, and it was a standard of
measurement established by a white Broadway insider and maintained
for decades by those who strove to perform their work in exactly that
way.
The problem with
most institutional efforts to foster diversity and inclusion is that
they leave untouched the standard for measuring excellence. At the
same time as institutions roll out new plans and policies to instill
diversity, they continue to measure individuals against a standard of
achievement established decades earlier by people who frankly didn’t
care a whit about inclusiveness. In graduate programs, for example,
the Graduate Record exam continues to be used as a standard way of
measuring student potential. Its use is defended as the only way to
judge merit from students coming from widely divergent undergraduate
program. Scholarship over the past twenty years, however, has shown
that the GRE is more accurate at predicting success at taking
standardized tests than on succeeding in graduate education. Yet, it
continues to be used to the benefit of students privileged by class
and/or race. Likewise standards for promotion in law, business, and
higher education were established by past professionals who were part
of homogenous professional fraternities. But even raising a question
about what it means to be a diverse institution raises hackles and
prompts harrumphs about “lowering standards.” As Michèle Lamont
recently observed, “Diversity and excellence are often pitted
against one another in American higher education. Those who oppose
taking diversity into consideration in university admission or other
forms of academic selection argue that some ‘get in’ because of
their skin color or gender while others ‘get in’ because of their
achievement and analytical skills.”28
Failing to maintain standards, defenders of the status quo often say,
will mean losing our high standing among our competitors.
Joplin’s second
assertion answers this point—he believed his work had been unfairly
damned by association with vulgarity. Instead of taking his work of
art on its own terms, the single-standard-for-excellence mentality of
the 1910s made a series of associations—between Joplin’s race,
racial stereotype, and Joplin’s music—that led to the conclusion
that Joplin’s compositions were tasteless and vulgar.
Twenty-first-century Americans may not be quite so blatant as that,
but the tacit message embedded in the defense of “excellence” is
that difference equates with inferiority. Of course, we then cringe
when the coming generation sneers at those who think, perform, and
create differently from the accepted norm, and we continue to wring
our hands when lack of respect for difference leads to racist acts.
But the brave new world of diverse, inclusive institutional life
demands that we display the courage to expand the ways of recognizing
outstanding achievement, both inside and outside of the mainstream.
In 1913, Joplin
spoke and Walton gave him a platform to reach the readers of the New
York Age. His words still resonate today. Joplin challenges
those of us who hear him to consider with a fresh perspective what it
means to be excellent; what it means to be co-workers in the kingdom
of culture; and how we might compose a new legacy of respect for the
future.
1
For information about the relationship between Scott Joplin and
Lester Walton, see Susan Curtis, Colored Memories: A
Biographer’s Quest for the Elusive Lester A. Walton (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2008), 11-16; 130-31. For information
about Scott Joplin’s early career, see Susan Curtis, Dancing to
a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1994).
2
For more on the C.V.B.A. and on Joplin’s involvement in the
organization, see “Motto of the C.V.B.A.,” New York Age,
January 6, 1910, 6, col. 4; “Colored Vaudevillians Organize,”
New York Age, June 10, 1909, 6, col. 1-3; “New C.V.B.A.
Committees,” New York Age, June 6, 1912, 6, col. 3; and
“C.V.B.A. Entertainment,” New York Age, August 17, 1911,
6, col. 1-2. Walton published the following preliminary history of
the organization: “Club Elects Officers,” New York Age,
May 26, 1910, 6, col. 1-2.
3
Lester A. Walton, “Detriment to Ragtime,” New York Age,
April 3, 1913, 6, col. 1.
4
“Questions and Answers,” The Etude 18 (February 1900):
52; and J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed., Grove’s Dictionary of Music
and Musicians (New York: Macmillan, 1908), Vol. 4, 16.
5
Carl Van Vechten, “The Great American Composer: His Grandfathers
are the Present Writers of Our Popular Ragtime Songs,” Vanity
Fair 8 (April 1917): 75, 140.
6
“Our Musical Condition,” The Negro Music Journal 1 (March
1903): 137-39. This piece and others in this journal reflected the
desire to claim middle-class respectability along the lines believed
to be articulated by white middle-class Americans. For a larger
context for this impulse, see Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race:
Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
7
“Detriment to Ragtime.”
8
The review appeared in the June 24, 1911, issue of The American
Musician, major excerpts of which can be found in James Haskin
and Kathleen Benson, eds., Scott Joplin (Garden City, N. Y.:
Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1978), 177-79.
9
One of the performers, Arthur Marshall, was a protégé of Joplin.
His memories of the opera are recorded in Rudi Blesh and Harriet
Janis, They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American
Music (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1950), 71, and in Vera Brodsky
Lawrence, ed., Collected Works of Scott Joplin (New York:
The New York Public Library, 1971), 1:xxvi-xxvii. The latter
source includes a full discussion of Joplin’s first opera and its
uncertain fate. For references to the preparations being made for
staging the opera, see “Scott Joplin’s Opera,” Sedalia
Weekly Conservator, August 22, 1903, 2, col. 3.
10
To see the sheet music score for The Ragtime Dance and to
read a discussion of Stark’s initial objection to publishing it,
see Lawrence, Collected Works of Scott Joplin, 1:xxii-xxiv,
293-301. See also “Our Trip to the World’s Fair City,”
Sedalia Times, April 26, 1902, 1, col. 1.
11
“To Play Ragtime in Europe,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
February 28, 1901, 3, col. 2-3; and “The King of Rag-Time
Composers Is Scott Joplin, A Colored St. Louisan, St. Louis
Globe-Democrat, June 7, 1903, Sporting Section, 5, col. 1-3.
12
The copy of Maple Leaf Rag is Item 4 in the Joplin File,
Starr Music Collection, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. The
advertisement appears on page 6.
13
Christensen’s Ragtime Review 1 (January 1915): 23; and “Can
You Imagine This?” Christensen’s Ragtime Review 1
(December 1914): 2.
14
Lester A. Walton, “Latest Negro Opera,” New York Age, May
25, 1911, 6, col. 3.
15
For a fuller discussion of Walton’s style as a critic, see Curtis,
Colored Memories, 11-32.
16
Quoted material is from Lester A. Walton, “Lafayette Theatre to
Have Colored Stock Co.,” New York Age, March 6, 1913, 6,
col. 1. For earlier mention, see “Lafayette Theatre,” New
York Age, February 27, 1913, 6, col. 2.
17
“Stock Co. at the Lafayette,” New York Age, March 13,
1913, 6, col. 2.
18
For a good biographical sketch of Cook, see Eileen Southern, ed.,
Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 76-77.
19
Lester A. Walton, “ ‘The Traitor’ Presented,” New York
Age, March 20, 1913, 6, col. 1; “Negro Players Disband,”
New York Age, March 27, 1913, 6, col. 2.
20
Walton to the Associated Press, March 21, 1913, Lester A. Walton
Papers, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, New York, NY
(hereinafter LAWPA), Box 7, File 1.
21
“‘World’ Discontinues Use of ‘Darkies,’” New York
Age, June 29, 1918, 1, col. 5.
22
For a full discussion of Walton’s campaign to get the word Negro
capitalized, see Curtis, Colored Memories, 84-90.
23
“The ‘Follies of 1912,’” New York Age, October 24,
1912, 6, col. 1.
24
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is A Country: Race and the Unfinished
Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004), 4.
25
Anderson is quoted in Dominique-Rene de Lerma, Reflections on
Afro-American Music (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University
Press, 1973), 74, 85.
26
See Walton to Charles Merz, January 12, 1945, LAWPA, Box 16, File
18, a letter in which Walton asks the editor of the New York
Times to correct the error, a correction that was made about two
decades later in Walton’s obituary.
27
Thomas F. Connolly, George Jean Nathan and the Making of Modern
American Drama Criticism (Danvers, Mass.: Associated University
Presses, Inc., 2000), 13.
28
Michèle Lamont, “Diversity and Excellence in Higher Education:
Not Alternatives but Additives,” Huff Post, April 24, 2009.
See also Lamont’s counterargument in How Professors Think:
Inside the Curious World of Academic Evaluation (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
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