Our Pick
Posted on @rawstates
Scott Joplin and the Maple Leaf Rag
1899
Sedalia, Missouri
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Joplin was playing in Sedalia's Black social clubs when a local publisher took a chance on a piano rag named for one of them. It sold half a million copies of sheet music, made ragtime the first Black-authored music to reach a mass white audience, and earned Joplin a penny a copy for the rest of his life, enough to write, and not enough to get the opera he cared about staged.
That was 1 of the hidden places.
Location: historic site
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