: Composing an African American Cultural Legacy” First Weiner Public Lecture, Rolla, MO, April 15, 2013, Prof. Susan Curtis
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.
