Joplin was the second of six children born to Giles Joplin, a former slave from North Carolina, and Florence Givens, a freeborn African-American woman from Kentucky. His birth date was accepted by early biographers Rudi Blesh and James Haskins as November 24, 1868, although later biographer Edward A. Berlin showed this was "almost certainly incorrect". There is disagreement over his exact place of birth in Texas, with Blesh identifying Texarkana, and Berlin showing the earliest record of Joplin being the June 1870 census which locates him in Linden, as a two-year-old.

By 1880, the Joplins moved to Texarkana, Arkansas, where Giles worked as a railroad laborer and Florence as a cleaner. As Joplin's father had played the violinfor plantation parties in North Carolina and his mother sang and played the banjo,Joplin was given a rudimentary musical education by his family, and from the age of seven he was allowed to play the piano while his mother cleaned.

At some point in the early 1880s, Giles Joplin left the family for another woman and Florence struggled to support her children through domestic work. Biographer Susan Curtis speculates that Florence's support of her son's musical education was a critical factor behind her separation from Giles, who wanted the boy to pursue practical employment that would supplement the family income.

At the age of 16, Joplin performed in a vocal quartet with three other boys in and around Texarkana, also playing piano. He also taught guitar and mandolin. According to a family friend, the young Joplin was serious and ambitious studying music and playing the piano after school. While a few local teachers aided him, he received most of his musical education from Julius Weiss, a German-

to a family friend, the young Joplin was serious and ambitious studying music and playing the piano after school. While a few local teachers aided him, he received most of his musical education from Julius Weiss, a German-born American Jewish music professor who had immigrated to Texas in the late 1860s and was employed as music tutor by a prominent local business family. Weiss, as described by San Diego Jewish World writer Eric George Tauber, "was no stranger to [receiving] race hatred ... As a Jew in Germany, he was often slapped and called a 'Christ-killer.'" Weiss had studied music at a German university and was listed in town records as a professor of music. Impressed by Joplin's talent, and realizing the Joplin family's dire straits, Weiss taught him free of charge. While tutoring Joplin from the ages of 11 to 16, Weiss introduced him to folk and classical music, including opera. Weiss helped Joplin appreciate music as an "art as well as an entertainment" and helped Florence acquire a used piano. According to Joplin's widow Lottie, Joplin never forgot Weiss. In his later years, after achieving fame as a composer, Joplin sent his former teacher "gifts of money when he was old and ill" until Weiss died.

In the late 1880s, having performed at various local events as a teenager, Joplin gave up his job as a railroad laborer and left Texarkana to become a traveling musician. Little is known about his movements at this time, although he is recorded in Texarkana in July 1891 as a member of the Texarkana Minstrels, who were raising money for a monument to Jefferson Davis, president of the former Confederate States of America. However, Joplin soon learned that there were few opportunities for black pianists. Churches and brothels were among the few options for steady work. Joplin played pre-ragtime "jig-piano" in various red-light districts throughout the mid-South, and some claim he was in Sedalia and St. Louis, Missouri, during this time.

In 1893, while in Chicago for the World's Fair, Joplin formed a band in which he played cornet and also arranged the band's music. Although the World's Fair minimized the involvement of African-Americans, black performers still came to the saloons, cafés and brothels that lined the fair. The exposition was attended by 27 million visitors and had a profound effect on many areas of American cultural life, including ragtime. Although specific information is sparse, numerous sources have credited the Chicago World's Fair with spreading the popularity of ragtime. Joplin found that his music, as well as that of other black performers, was popular with visitors. By 1897, ragtime had become a national craze in U.S. cities and was described by the St. Louis Dispatch as "a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city bred people".

In 1894, Joplin arrived in Sedalia, Missouri. At first, Joplin stayed with the family of Arthur Marshall, a 13-year-old boy who later became one of Joplin's students and a ragtime composer in his own right. There is no record of Joplin having a residence in the town until 1904, as Joplin was making a living as a touring musician.

There is little precise evidence known about Joplin's activities at this time, although he performed as a solo musician at dances and at the major black clubs in Sedalia, the Black 400 Club and the Maple Leaf Club. He performed in the Queen City Cornet Band and his own six-piece dance orchestra. A tour with his own singing group, the Texas Medley Quartet, gave him his first opportunity to publish his own compositions, and it is known that he went to Syracuse, New York, and Texas. Two businessmen from New York published Joplin's first two works, the songs "Please Say You Will" and "A Picture of Her Face", in 1895.Joplin's visit to Temple, Texas, enabled him to have three pieces published there in 1896, including the "Great Crush Collision March", which commemorated a planned train crash on the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad on September 15 that he may have witnessed. The march was described by one of Joplin's biographers as a "special ... early essay in

ragtime." While in Sedalia, Joplin taught piano to students who included future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Brun Campbell and Scott Hayden.Joplin enrolled at the George R. Smith College, where he apparently studied "advanced harmony and composition." The college's records were destroyed in a fire in 1925, and biographer Edward A. Berlin notes that it was unlikely that a small college for African-Americans would be able to provide such a course.

Although there were hundreds of rags in print by the time the "Maple Leaf Rag" was published, Joplin was not far behind. He completed his first published rag, "Original Rags" in 1897, the same year that the first ragtime work appeared in print, the "Mississippi Rag" by William Krell. The "Maple Leaf Rag" was likely to have been known in Sedalia before its publication in 1899; Brun Campbell claimed to have seen the manuscript of the work in around 1898. The exact circumstances that led to the publication of the "Maple Leaf Rag" are unknown and a number of versions of the event contradict each other. After several unsuccessful approaches to publishers, Joplin signed a contract on August 10, 1899, with John Stillwell Stark, a retailer of musical instruments who became his most important publisher. The contract stipulated that Joplin would receive a 1% royalty on all sales of the rag, with a minimum sales price of 25 cents. With the inscription "To the Maple Leaf Club" prominently visible along the top of at least some editions, it is likely that the rag was named after the Maple Leaf Club, although there is no direct evidence to prove the link, and there were many other possible sources for the name in and around Sedalia at the time.

There have been many claims about the sales of the "Maple Leaf Rag", one being that Joplin was the first musician to sell 1 million copies of a piece of instrumental music. Joplin's first biographer, Rudi Blesh, wrote that during its first six months the piece sold 75,000 copies and became "the first great instrumental sheet music hit in America." However, research by Joplin's later biographer Edward A. Berlin demonstrated that this was not the case; the initial print-run of 400 took one year to sell, and, under the terms of Joplin's contract with a 1% royalty, would have given Joplin an income of $4 (or approximately $146 at current prices). Later sales were steady and would have given Joplin an income that would have covered his expenses. In 1909, estimated sales would have given him an income of $600 annually (approximately $16,968 in current prices).

The "Maple Leaf Rag" did serve as a model for the hundreds of rags to come from future composers, especially in the development of classic ragtime. After the publication of the "Maple Leaf Rag", Joplin was soon being described as "King of rag time writers", not least by himself on the covers of his own work, such as "The Easy Winners" and "Elite Syncopations".

During his time in St. Louis, Joplin collaborated with Scott Hayden in the composition of four rags. It was in St. Louis that Joplin produced some of his best-known works, including "The Entertainer", "March Majestic", and the short theatrical work "The Ragtime Dance". In 1901, Joplin married his

first wife Belle Jones (1875–1903) a sister-in-law of Scott Hayden. By 1903, the Joplins had moved to a 13-room house, renting some of the rooms to lodgers, who included pianist-composers Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden. Joplin did not work as a pianist in the saloons in St Louis, which was usually a major source of income for musicians, as he was "probably outclassed by the competition" and was, according to Stark's son, "a mediocre pianist". Biographer Berlin speculated that by 1903 Joplin was already showing early signs of syphilis, which reduced his coordination and "pianistic skills". In 1903, Joplin's only child—a daughter—died. Joplin and his first wife drifted apart.

In June 1904, Joplin married Freddie Alexander of Little Rock, Arkansas, the young woman to whom he had dedicated "The Chrysanthemum". She died on September 10, 1904, of complications resulting from a cold, ten weeks after their wedding."Bethena", Joplin's first work copyrighted after Freddie's death, was described by one biographer as "an enchantingly beautiful piece that is among the greatest of ragtime waltzes".

During this time, Joplin created an opera company of 30 people and produced his first opera A Guest of Honor for a national tour. It is not certain how many productions were staged, or even whether this was an all-black show or a racially mixed production. During the tour, either in Springfield, Illinois, or Pittsburg, Kansas, someone associated with the company stole the box office receipts. Joplin could not meet the company's payroll or pay for its lodgings at a theatrical boarding house. It is believed that the score for A Guest of Honor was lost and perhaps destroyed because of non-payment of the company's boarding house bill.