1868 Scott Joplin is born in North Texas, the son of a former slave.
As a young man, he takes up piano and several other instruments and plays for dances and shows. His formal musical education seems to have been brief; all the same, he forms the goal of creating popular music that would have the prestige and cultivating force of "art" music. In the 1890s, he settles in Sedalia and meets John Stark, a music-store owner who will become his publisher. In one version, Stark is in a club having a beer when he first hears Joplin's music. (As with much of Joplin's biography, the real facts are hard to ascertain.)
1899 Publication of the Maple Leaf Rag. Sales are slow at first, but then it becomes a nationwide best-seller. Music publishers churn out hundreds of rags to capitalize on the trend. A typical one will feature crude stereotypes of African-Americans on the cover and forgettable formulaic music on the inside.

In the midst of all this, Joplin will insist on the excellence and restraint of what will become known as "classic ragtime" - as Stark's advertisements put it, "as high-class as Chopin."

1903 The first recording of Maple Leaf Rag is made, in Minneapolis. No copies are known to survive.

1907 Joplin moves to New York. He composes pieces such as Solace, Pineapple Rag, and Wall Street Rag, and his most ambitious work, the opera Treemonisha.

1907 In Paris, Claude Debussy writes his rag-inflected Golliwog's Cakewalk. (The cakewalk was one of the ancestors of the rag.) Other modernists who will help themselves to ragged rhythms are Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Hindemith.

1911 Irving Berlin writes "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Did he steal the melody from Joplin? According to one tradition, yes; but ragtime scholars are unable to verify it.

1917 Joplin's last years are not happy ones. He continues to grow as a composer, but is dogged by the symptoms of the syphilis that will kill him, and frustrated by his inability to secure a production of Treemonisha. A year before his death. Joplin makes a piano roll of Maple Leaf Rag. A unique document, but his health is failing and the playing is full of mistakes. Joplin dies in 1917, at 49.