He was born around 1868, somewhere between Texarkana and Marshall, Texas. Since his father, a former slave, played violin and his mother, a freeborn woman, banjo, he was exposed to music at an early age. He would accompany his mother to work and play pianos in the houses she cleaned. At 12, the family moved to Texarkana, Ark., where his father worked for the railroad and his mother continued as a domestic for affluent families. His mother, recognizing his raw talent, took him to a local music teacher named Julius Weiss, who, realizing the family's poverty, took him on as a student at no charge. Under Weiss, he learned piano technique and European opera music.
He left home at 17 and traveled around Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi as an itinerant musician, mainly in gentlemen's clubs. In 1893, he was in Chicago for the World's Fair, leading a band and playing cornet; by 1894, he was in Sedalia, Mo., still playing cornet in a band, teaching piano and also playing at the Black 400, a Black gentleman's club.
While in Sedalia, he took a music theory course at George R. Smith College, learning how to write the music he previously had been composing by ear. His publishing career led, in 1899, to a piano composition that would earn him a small -- but dependable -- income (at one cent per copy) for the rest of his life: "Maple Leaf Rag." Other compositions followed.
In 1901, he moved to St. Louis with his new wife, Belle. He began to devote more time to composition and became associated with the publisher, John Starks. Starks' daughter, Eleanor, a highly accomplished classical pianist, became his major musical adviser. Although he continued to turn out ragtime pieces, such as "The Entertainer," in 1903, he wrote an opera, "The Guest of Honor," which was never officially published. His marriage to Belle soon ended and he married Freddie Alexander, from Little Rock. After only 10 weeks of marriage, Freddie contracted pneumonia and died. He left Sedalia for Chicago and New York, while continuing to write commercially successful ragtime. In 1907, he began working on a second opera, "Treemonisha," publishing it in 1911.
By 1917, he was in a mental institution and died from syphilis, a disease he had likely contracted 20 years earlier.
Who was this influential composer and musician, who claimed that Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" was stolen from an early draft of his opera, "Treemonisha"?