story[0]The record gives his birth only as sometime between the summer of 1867 and mid-January 1868, on the Texas-Arkansas border; no more precise date survives in the institutional record consulted here. [A2]
story[1]He trained in Sedalia, Missouri, studying music at George R. Smith College and playing in local ensembles, including the Queen City Cornet Band, before opening his own piano studio and teaching younger composers. [A2]
story[2]Engagements at Sedalia's Maple Leaf Club inspired the tune he published in 1899 as Maple Leaf Rag, through John Stark, his major publisher. [A2]
story[3]In 1908 he self-published School of Ragtime, a treatise instructing pianists to give each note its proper value and never play ragtime fast. [A2]
story[4]In 1911, at his own expense, he published the vocal score of Treemonisha, an opera in three acts with his own libretto, which the Library of Congress catalogs at 230 pages. [A1]
story[5]The opera reached him twice while he lived: a full cast read it through once, without orchestra, scenery, or costumes, for an audience of seventeen in 1911, and a student orchestra played its Act II ballet alone in May 1915. [A6]
story[6]He died in 1917; the opera was not given a fully staged, orchestrated production until January 1972, in Atlanta, fifty-five years later. [A2]
