Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag' (1899) was the first instrumental sheet music to sell a million copies — paving the way for the whole pop music industry. This 50-question deep dive traces ragtime from Sedalia, Missouri, and Tom Turpin's 'Harlem Rag' through the 'Big Three' of Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb, then into the 1970s Joplin renaissance sparked by Joshua Rifkin's Nonesuch recording and Marvin Hamlisch's Oscar-winning score for The Sting.
Each round presents 10 randomized questions from a pool of 50, with four multiple-choice options and instant feedback after every answer. Your final score comes with a performance tier and shareable results.
You'll explore ragtime's African-American roots in the Midwest and South, the cakewalk dances that inspired it, the AABBACCDD form and oom-pah bass, Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha and posthumous Pulitzer Prize, player piano rolls, the stride piano and novelty piano that followed, and modern interpreters from Dick Hyman and Max Morath to MacArthur Fellow Reginald Robinson and the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia.
Scott Joplin composed 'The Entertainer' in 1902. The piece was later revived by Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement for the 1973 film The Sting, winning an Academy Award and helping spark a worldwide ragtime revival.
Syncopation is rhythmic displacement in which accents fall on normally weak beats or between beats. In ragtime, the right hand plays a syncopated 'ragged' melody against a steady oom-pah bass in the left hand.
Ragtime was a direct precursor to jazz, feeding into New Orleans styles played by musicians like Jelly Roll Morton. It also gave rise to stride piano in Harlem through James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, plus novelty piano like Zez Confrey's 'Kitten on the Keys.'
Last updated: April 2026