In the early 1970s, ragtime jazz was considered about as cool as Mantovani. Marvin Hamlisch, whose interpretation of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” reached number one on the Billboard charts, was ...

In the post-Civil War era, the cruel breath of slavery and the aborted plan of Reconstruction still hung over the American South. But in the Joplin home, banjo and fiddle music filled the family’s ...