Though far beyond the publisher’s target age group of 4–8, I am thoroughly enchanted by this book about Scott Joplin. The drawings are playful, the colors glorious, the text almost poetic, and the history is reasonably accurate. It opens with a two-page spread—about 20 inches wide and 12 inches high—showing Southern Blacks in the immediate post-Civil War period at work in the fields and homes. The text begins,
In the valley of the Red River
where the soil was as rich
as most folks were poor,
four states sat side by side
like colors on a quilt . . . .
That hint prompted me to notice that the colorful design of these two pages is like that of a quilt, a theme that occurs in many of the book’s two-page spreads as well as on the back of the dust cover.
Turning to the next two-page spread, we see the people now singing, dancing, and shouting “Juneteenth,” celebrating the end of slavery in Texas. Scott Joplin's introduction comes on the next page, as a young boy dancing with his mother. The text reads,
Scott, the son of a man
who had been enslaved,
would someday make America dance.
The following pages show the young Scott making music with his parents and siblings, playing the piano in a white family’s home where his mother worked, studying music with a teacher (Julius Weiss), and finally setting off on his life as a musician. As a young man, he’s pictured playi
