ABSTRACT
If the music that we call “classic” ragtime could be said to have had a home address, it was 2220–2222 Market Street, in St. Louis: the music that we call “classic” ragtime could be said to have had a home address, it was 2220–2222 Market Street, in St. Louis: the site of Tom Turpin's Rosebud Bar. The music settled there when it was young, and it lived there for six formative years. The tall, barrelchested Turpin was literally and figuratively the biggest man in ragtime at this crucial stage in its development. He was the first major composer of rags, and he was the original patron of the syncopated arts. As mentor, friend, and employer to the handful of young black men who wrote and played the best early ragtime, he nurtured the music by nurturing them. Among the beneficiaries of his largesse were Scott Hayden, Arthur Marshall, Joe Jordan, Louis Chauvin, Charlie Thompson, and Artie Matthews. With Turpin to encourage them and Scott Joplin to inspire them, they became ragtime fiends. And in centering their aimless lives on ragtime, this band of musical delinquents melded into the first “school” of American popular composers.
