Before there was the Duke and the Count, there was the King. The ragtimes of Scott Joplin and others influenced the development of early jazz and especially jazz pianists, including Eubie Blake, Thomas "Fats" Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. Like technology, musical styles sometimes persist long past the point of being fashionable. Thus the music roll, invented in the 1880's, has persisted into the twenty-first century. These interfaces often feature a digital music roll, which allows musicians to place every note at a timestamp and play it back with a computer. Many film soundtracks are now crafted using this type of software. Digital audio workstations enable users to create music using virtual instruments. Physical music rolls are now outdated technology, but it's interesting to note that their design has influenced modern software. This was a way of sharing music before recorded audio was commonplace. These rolled up pieces of paper, perforated for machines to read, were fed into player pianos and played back as music. In the early 1900's, that is how many people would have first heard them. You don't need a pianist to hear a rag, if you have a music roll and a player piano. The story of his life is filled with tragedy and suffering, but his art endures. Joplin's music has earned a place in our culture despite a relentless string of professional and personal setbacks. However, as you'll find, in some ways it's surprising we know his name at all. Scott Joplin, a African American man who was called "the king of ragtime", was the most famous composer of piano rags who ever lived.
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