While still in his early teens, Scott joined the ranks of itinerant musicians, earning his way by playing piano in the honky-tonks of villages and towns in the Mississippi Valley country and absorbing all the while the folk music of his people and the "jig piano" style of the self-taught pianists with whom he worked.

In 1885 Joplin arrived at St. Louis, then a frontier town with a thriving Black population and a prosperous sporting-life district. Joplin got a job playing piano in the Silver Dollar, a saloon owned by "Honest John Turpin, one of the most important men in that district.

During the next decade Joplin played in St. Louis and other Missouri towns, organized vocal and instrumental groups, and began to write down some of his musical ideas. In 1895 he toured widely with a vocal group he had organized, the Texas Medley Quartette (actually a double quartette), and was thereby able to plug his music as well as contact publishers. The evidence indicated, however, that Joplin played his music in syncopated style despite his use of traditional notation in the published versions. He would hardly have been able to find a publisher at that time for his music had he written it as he played it.

In 1896 Joplin settled in Sedalia, Missouri, where he had previously lived during 1894. There he played piano at the Maple Leaf Club, took courses in advanced harmony and composition at the Gorge Smith College for Negroes, played with a local brass band, worked seriously at his composition, and generally kept in the center of the town's musical activities.

By 1898 the ragtime craze was sweeping the country and Joplin was able to find, for the first time, a publisher for one of his syncopated pieces. HisOriginal Rags was published in March, 1899. Later that same year a white publisher, John Stillwell Stark, heard Joplin play a piano rag at the Maple Leaf Club, liked what he heard, and bought the piece for fifty dollars and royalties to the composer. The Maple Leaf Rag (see the photograph above of the original sheet music) was a financial success, and it became a landmark in the history of American music. The Joplin-Stark partnership, which was responsible for a number of ragtime masterpieces, made Joplin's name a household word and made Stark the leading ragtime publisher in the country. Their first publication set high standards for the "classic" rags that were to be published later. The Maple Leaf Rag became a test piece for every ragtime pianist; its technical brilliance ushered in "a new order" for showy, virtuoso instrumental exercises in syncopated style.

The Maple Leaf Rag sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the first decade of its publication. Scott Joplin gave up his piano playing, moved back to St. Louis, and devoted himself wholly to teaching music and composing.

The years 1906–09 were restless ones for Joplin. After moving from place to place, he set out on a series of vaudeville tours. Finally he settled permanently in New York City. Despite the publication of several piano rags during the first years of his stay in New York, Joplin concentrated most of his creative energy on his second opera, Treemonisha (A Guest of Honor, a Ragtime Opera was his first).