Edward A. Berlin's meticulously researched 'King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era' is a welcome addition to the growing literature on American popular music. Berlin's careful accounting of Joplin's life, his achievements as well as his failures, is greatly enhanced by a generous array of photographs, reproductions of the covers of sheet music, programs and advertisements of events ... Read morein which Joplin participated, census records, legal documents such as marriage certificates, and Joplin's music itself.
Charles Merrell Berg, Magill's Literary Annual 1995
The most thorough and useful biography yet of Scott Joplin.
The New York Times
Berlin brings the story full circle with a comprehensive summary of the fate of ragtime from its eclipse in the 1920s and 1930s to its comeback in the 1940s and the revival of Joplin's work still going on today.
Publishers Weekly
The most accurate and informative Joplin biography. Berlin has a sure grasp of the ragtime era....Berlin's analysis is always illuminating and expert.
Time
Berlin has done a dogged job of digging up what little documentary evidence exists; he even proves that Joplin had a second wife, who died shortly after their marriage....Berlin's insights into Joplin's compositional process are enlightening.....Berlin edges out the competition, thanks to his more thorough knowledge of music.
Kirkus Reviews
A masterful demonstration of the scholar's art, revealing previously unknown aspects of Joplin as ragtime musician, teacher, composer, and student....Enlightens as it challenges, traversing the worlds of music, culture and politics in describing Joplin's publishing arena and the cultures of prostitution, the church, the social club, and family life. The thorough discussion of Hoplin's famous Maple Leaf Rag, of his opera Treemonisha, of the tour schedule for his first opera A Guest of Honor, and of his relationship to his second wife, are significant and alone are worth the reading of this book. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era is a major contribution to American musical scholarship.
Samuel A. Flloyd, Jr., author of The Power of Black Music
Recommended for American music collections.
Library Journal
[A] first-rate study....Black musical history has few happier endings than this celebration of the genius of Scott Joplin.
San Francisco Chronicle
The most subtantial account of Joplin's life and experiences we have.
Chicago Tribune
A state-of-the-art volume.
West Coast Rag
[Berlin] examines and explains Joplin's many compositions in language that even the musically untrained can understand.
JazzTimes
Berlin, an expert on the world of ragtime whose two previous books on it are standards, proffers a splendid new study of the acknowledged king of the music....This biography will be essential in any library concerned with American music.
Booklist
In telling Joplin's story, the author examines the red-light district of St. Louis, where both Joplin and the great blues composer W.C. Handy lived around the turn of the century.
The Washington Post Book WorldR
It is a thorough and many-faceted profile of America's first black classicist and catalyst for a popular music sensation that went unabated for twenty years. Berlin's role here is not so much a biographer, but an investigative reporter....No one deserves this type of fair, admiring, intense historical and musicological research more than Joplin, one of the greatest of American composers. And no one was more up to the task of honoring him than Edward Berlin.
Notes
The most comprehensive and accurate published source of information about Joplin and a valuable complement to Berlin's earlier book, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History....The King of Ragtime contains every fact about Scott Joplin that could possible be unearthed....His book, a milestone in the extended Joplin revival, goes a long way toward correcting a widely disseminated misinformation.
American Music
Not only was no stone left unturned [by Berlin], but very few pebbles are left for other scholars to pick up.
San Francisco Chronicle
What a scrupulous historian and musicologist Mr. Berlin is, rigorously sorting through the facts of Joplin's life and era....The history of popular music needs this.
The New York Times
The most accurate and informative Joplin biography.
Time
The book contains a useful chronology; a catalogue of works; and two songs not easily available elsewhere. It is most unlikely that anything further will be discovered after Berlin's tenacious research over such a long period. Anyone interested in Joplin and in the whole scene must be unreservedly grateful.
Peter Dickinson, Musical Opinion Quarterly
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