February 9, 2012

The popularity of the music of Scott Joplin, who composed more than forty ragtime piano pieces in the early 1900s, slowly waned after his death in 1917. Much of his popularity reemerged in the 1970s when his composition “The Entertainer” was used as the theme song in the 1973 Oscar-winning film The Sting. Composer and pianist Marvin Hamlisch’s recorded adaptation of the composition was a hit on the 1974 pop music charts. Joplin spent his childhood in Texarkana (Miller County).