He won a Pulitzer Prize for shaping the sound of turn-of-the-century America, yet he died penniless in a psychiatric hospital and lay in an unmarked pauper's grave for nearly 60 years. This episode pieces together the life of Scott Joplin, from a railway laborer's family in post-Civil War Texas, a mother who cleaned houses so he could practice on wealthy families' pianos, and a German Jewish tutor, Julius Weiss, who taught him classical music free of charge.

We follow him through the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the publication of Maple Leaf Rag with John Stark in 1899, the loss of his opera A Guest of Honor when a boardinghouse seized the score, the deaths of his infant daughter and second wife Freddie, and the disastrous 1915 Harlem rehearsal of Treemonisha. We close with his death in 1917 and the 1970s revival sparked by Joshua Rifkin's re ...