Ragtime Trivia
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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.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which rhythmic device gives ragtime its distinctive 'ragged' feel?
Syncopation
Syncopation: Joplin's 1908 manual School of Ragtime drilled pianists in it through six exercises, just as quick-study ragtime schools were springing up across America.
Q 02Which strutting dance, a forerunner of ragtime, began as contests among Black Americans on Southern plantations?
Cakewalk
Cakewalk: the couple with the most elaborate steps won a cake as the prize, and many of the earliest published rags were written for the dance.
Q 03Ragtime's steady left-hand bass was borrowed from the marches of which American bandleader?
John Philip Sousa
John Philip Sousa returned the favour: his band's 1900 European tour, which played the Paris Exposition, probably gave Europeans their first taste of ragtime.
Q 04Rags were usually written in 4/4 or which other time signature?
2/4
2/4, the metre of the marches that rags grew out of: the left hand plays bass notes on the strong beats and chords on the weak ones.
Q 05James Reese Europe's regimental band took ragtime to France in 1918 with the 369th Infantry, a unit nicknamed what?
The Harlem Hellfighters
The Harlem Hellfighters: the band's 1918 tour of France drew great enthusiasm and helped spread the new American sound across Europe.
Q 06Tom Turpin's Rosebud bar, where Scott Joplin and other pianists gathered, was the hub of ragtime in which city?
St. Louis
St. Louis: by its pianists' standards Joplin was no virtuoso, so after moving there in 1901 he concentrated on teaching and composing instead of playing the saloons.
Q 07Which 1893 event, attended by 27 million people, is widely credited with spreading ragtime nationwide?
The Chicago World's Fair
The Chicago World's Fair: pianists from across the country met in the saloons and cafés around the grounds, traded regional styles and took the new music home with them.
Q 08Which composer was the only white member of ragtime's 'Big Three', alongside Scott Joplin and James Scott?
Joseph Lamb
Joseph Lamb met his idol Joplin by chance in a publisher's office in 1907, and Joplin liked his rags enough to get the first one into print.
Q 09Which 1899 Scott Joplin piece became his biggest hit and the model for countless later rags?
Maple Leaf Rag
Maple Leaf Rag: unusually for the time, Joplin's contract paid him a royalty on every copy sold, and steady sales supported him for the rest of his life.
Q 10To which Missouri town did Scott Joplin move in 1894, teaching piano and playing in its social clubs?
Sedalia
Sedalia: his most famous rag was probably named for a social club there, and the town bills itself as the 'Cradle of Ragtime'.
Q 11Which music-store owner bought Scott Joplin's 1899 hit and went on to become his most important publisher?
John Stark
John Stark paid $50 plus royalties at a time when most composers got only a small flat fee, and the hit let him turn his music shop into a national publishing house.
Q 12Under his 1899 contract, what royalty did Scott Joplin earn on each copy of his most famous rag?
One cent
One cent a copy: small, but any royalty at all was unusual in 1899, when composers normally sold a piece outright for a small flat fee.
Q 13Scott Joplin's own playing survives only in which form, all made in 1916?
Piano rolls
Piano rolls: he never made a sound recording, and his playing on the 1916 rolls is so uneven that biographers hear his failing health in it.
Q 21Students of which Boston music school won a Grammy for the 1973 Joplin album The Red Back Book?
New England Conservatory
New England Conservatory: its president, Gunther Schuller, formed the student ensemble in 1972 for a festival of American music, then took its period arrangements of Joplin into the studio.
Q 22Which Scott Joplin rag became a pop hit in 1974 as the theme of the film The Sting?
The Entertainer
The Entertainer: published in 1902, it had been largely forgotten until the film made it a hit 72 years later, long after ragtime itself had gone out of fashion.
Q 23Who adapted Scott Joplin's rags for The Sting and won an Academy Award for the score?
Marvin Hamlisch
Q 14Scott Joplin died in a Manhattan mental hospital in 1917 from the late stage of which disease?
Syphilis
Syphilis: it wrecked his coordination and then his mind while he was still sketching a ragtime symphony, which vanished along with his other late manuscripts.
Q 15Scott Joplin's 1902 rag 'The Strenuous Life' paid tribute to which US president?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt had preached 'the strenuous life' in an 1899 speech urging Americans to embrace hard effort; Joplin's rag followed soon after he became president.
Q 16Which Scott Joplin opera, about a woman who leads her community against conjurers, was not fully staged until 1972?
Treemonisha
Treemonisha: the only performance Joplin managed was a bare run-through with himself at the piano, no orchestra and no costumes, and it attracted no backers.
Q 17Scott Joplin's lost first opera, A Guest of Honor, is thought to portray which Black leader's 1901 White House dinner?
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington: Joplin took the opera on tour in 1903, but the takings were stolen, the company was stranded and the score, seized for unpaid bills, has never been found.
Q 18Which honour was Scott Joplin awarded posthumously in 1976?
Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize: the special citation came 59 years after Joplin died sick, poor and discouraged, having failed to get his opera properly staged.
Q 19The 1977 biopic Scott Joplin starred which actor as the composer?
Billy Dee Williams
Billy Dee Williams played Joplin three years before becoming Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back; the film was shot for television but released in cinemas instead.
Q 20Joshua Rifkin's 1970 album of Scott Joplin rags was issued by Nonesuch, a label then known for which music?
Classical
Classical: the record became a classical best-seller, fitting for a composer who had spent his life trying to lift ragtime to the level of concert music.
Marvin Hamlisch's single of the film's theme reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1974, putting a piano rag from 1902 into the pop charts.
Q 24Which French composer wrote a ragtime into Parade, the 1917 ballet with sets and costumes by Picasso?
Erik Satie
Erik Satie called the number 'Ragtime du paquebot', the steamship rag; it was later arranged for solo piano and became popular as a piece in its own right.
Q 25The Sting is set in 1936, when which jazz style ruled American dance floors?
Swing
Swing: the film's Joplin rags were two decades out of date for its Depression-era setting, yet its soundtrack took the 1970s ragtime revival to a mass audience.
Q 26Zez Confrey's 1921 hit 'Kitten on the Keys' popularized which flashy, speed-driven successor to ragtime?
Novelty piano
Novelty piano: its showy, finger-twisting pieces came mostly from schooled white pianists, and Confrey's hit set off a fad that lasted through the 1920s.
Q 27Which piano style did James P. Johnson and Fats Waller build out of ragtime in 1920s New York?
Stride
Stride: the left hand leaps between low bass notes and chords higher up the keyboard, and unlike ragtime the music was meant to be improvised.
Q 28Jelly Roll Morton's 'Spanish tinge' borrowed the rhythm of which dance, also heard in Bizet's Carmen?
The habanera
The habanera, a Cuban dance: Morton worked its rhythm into pieces such as 'The Crave' and maintained that jazz needed such Spanish touches to sound right.
Q 29Which ragtime pianist died in 1983, five days after celebrations marking what he said was his 100th birthday?
Eubie Blake
Eubie Blake always gave his birth year as 1883, but census, military and passport records published since 2003 all say 1887, which would have made him 96.
Q 30Which 1921 musical became a landmark all-Black Broadway hit and helped launch Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson?
Shuffle Along
Shuffle Along: its hit song 'I'm Just Wild About Harry' came back in 1948 as the campaign song of President Harry Truman.