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60 free Ragtime trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
55 free Ragtime trivia questions with answers. Ragtime was America's first home-grown pop music, and 'ragtime' also names a great novel, a film and a Broadway musical. This quiz covers all of it. On the music side: Scott Joplin and the Maple Leaf Rag, publisher John Stark and Sedalia, the Big Three of Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb, syncopation and the cakewalk, Jelly Roll Morton, Eubie Blake, novelty piano and stride, Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band, the European composers who borrowed the style, and the 1970s revival driven by Joshua Rifkin, Gunther Schuller and Marvin Hamlisch's score for The Sting. On the other side: E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel, Milos Forman's 1981 film with James Cagney's last performance, and the 1998 Ahrens and Flaherty musical through its 2009 and 2025 revivals. Easy questions ask which rag scored The Sting and who wrote the novel; the hard ones want the name of Tom Turpin's saloon, the year Eubie Blake was really born and the Satie ballet with a rag in it. It suits pianists, theater fans and anyone who has hummed The Entertainer at an ice cream truck. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the composers, works and productions, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01What musical term describes ragtime's 'ragged' rhythm, with accents falling between the beats?
Syncopation
Joplin called the effect 'weird and intoxicating' and used the word 'swing' to describe how to play it, decades before swing became a jazz style.
Q 02Which pre-ragtime dance form took its name from the prize at plantation dance contests?
Cakewalk
It began as a processional partner dance performed with mock formality, and many early rags were written for it.
Q 03Ragtime's steady left-hand bass was borrowed from the marches of which American bandleader?
John Philip Sousa
One critic called ragtime an Afro-American version of the polka or the Sousa-style march, with a syncopated melody laid over the top.
Q 04Rags were usually written in 4/4 or which other time signature?
2/4
Bass notes land on the strong beats and chords on the weak ones; a rag written in triple time is called a ragtime waltz.
Q 05Which vaudeville musician first used the word 'ragtime' in 1896 and holds the earliest copyright on a published rag?
Ben Harney
His 'You've Been a Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down' was registered in Louisville in January 1895, and he later billed himself as ragtime's inventor.
Q 06Which St. Louis saloon, run by ragtime pioneer Tom Turpin, was where Joplin and other pianists gathered?
The Rosebud Café
Turpin was so large that his piano sat on blocks so he could play standing up, and Joplin named a 1905 march after the bar.
Q 07Which 1893 event, attended by 27 million people, is widely credited with spreading ragtime nationwide?
The Chicago World's Fair
Joplin led a band there playing cornet, and by 1897 ragtime was a national craze.
Q 08Which of the 'Big Three' classic ragtime composers was the only one who was not African American?
Joseph Lamb
He met Joplin in 1907 while buying sheet music at Stark's office, and later spent decades working as an accountant while composing only as a hobby.
Q 09Which 1899 Scott Joplin piece became ragtime's first great hit and the model for the classic rag?
Maple Leaf Rag
The first print run of 400 copies took a year to sell, but the piece brought Joplin a steady income for the rest of his life.
Q 10To which Missouri town did Joplin move in 1894, playing at the Black 400 Club and teaching piano?
Sedalia
The town now hosts the Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival, and his most famous rag was probably named for a club there.
Q 11Which music-store owner bought Joplin's 1899 hit and went on to become his most important publisher?
John Stark
He paid $50 plus royalties, and his son later described Joplin as a mediocre pianist who composed on paper rather than at the keyboard.
Q 12Under his 1899 contract, what royalty did Joplin earn on each copy of his most famous rag?
One cent
With a minimum sale price of 25 cents, the first 400 copies earned him only a few dollars.
Q 13Joplin never made an audio recording. His playing survives on how many piano rolls, all cut in 1916?
Seven
Biographers think the rolls capture a man already suffering the tremors of the illness that killed him a year later.
Q 21Gunther Schuller's ensemble won a 1973 Grammy for which album of Joplin band arrangements?
The Red Back Book
The title is the nickname of a Stark collection called Standard High-Class Rags, so called for the color of its covers.
Q 22Which Joplin rag, the theme of The Sting (1973), became the top ice cream truck tune?
The Entertainer
It was first recorded not on piano but on mandolin and guitar by a group called the Blue Boys in 1928.
Q 23Who adapted Joplin's rags for The Sting and won an Academy Award for the score?
Marvin Hamlisch
Schuller grumbled that he won an Oscar for music he did not write and arrangements he did not make, adding: 'that's show biz'.
Q 14Joplin died in a Manhattan mental hospital in 1917 from the late stage of which disease?
Syphilis
He was 48, and his death is often used to mark the end of the ragtime era.
Q 15Joplin was buried in a pauper's grave in Queens. For how many years did it stay unmarked?
57
The marker finally arrived in 1974, the same year the film built on his music won Best Picture.
Q 16Which Joplin opera, about a woman who leads her community against conjurers, was not fully staged until 1972?
Treemonisha
Joplin paid to publish the piano-vocal score himself in 1911; a 1915 read-through in Harlem was such a failure that the audience walked out.
Q 17In Joplin's 1911 opera, the kidnapped heroine is about to be thrown into what before Remus rescues her?
A wasps' nest
The scene echoes the Br'er Rabbit briar patch story, one of several African-American folk tales woven into the plot.
Q 18Joplin was awarded a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize in which year?
1976
The citation called it a Bicentennial-year award for his contributions to American music, and it honored his opera specifically.
Q 19The 1977 biopic Scott Joplin starred which actor as the composer?
Billy Dee Williams
Art Carney played his publisher, and a 90-year-old ragtime veteran appeared as the judge of a piano-cutting contest.
Q 20Whose 1970 album 'Scott Joplin: Piano Rags' became Nonesuch Records' first million-seller?
Joshua Rifkin
The record put ragtime in the classical bins for the first time, and he was later asked (and declined) to score The Sting.
Q 24The single from The Sting's theme peaked at which position on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1974?
No. 3
The New York Times responded that 'the whole nation has begun to take notice' of a composer dead for 57 years.
Q 25The Sting is scored with ragtime though it is set in which Depression-era year?
1936
The anachronism never hurt it: the film won seven Oscars including Best Picture and revived Joplin's reputation.
Q 26Zez Confrey's 1921 hit 'Kitten on the Keys' popularized which flashy, speed-driven successor to ragtime?
Novelty piano
Confrey said the piece was inspired by hearing his grandmother's cat walk across her keyboard.
Q 27Which Harlem piano style, developed by James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, is named for the left hand's leaps?
Stride
Unlike ragtime players, its pianists improvised freely and applied the style to the pop songs of the day.
Q 28Jelly Roll Morton said the 'Spanish tinge' gave his music the rhythm of which dance?
The tango
He also claimed to have invented jazz outright in 1902, a boast critics have argued over ever since.
Q 29Which ragtime pianist died in 1983, five days after celebrations of his supposed 100th birthday (he was 96)?
Eubie Blake
Records show he was born in 1887, not the 1883 he claimed, and he had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom two years earlier.
Q 30Which 1921 Sissle and Blake revue was the first hit Broadway musical by and about Black Americans?
Shuffle Along
One of its songs later became Harry Truman's campaign theme in the 1948 presidential election.