I recently made a connection that has been in front of me for 40 plus years and which has nearly bowled me over. I spent the last weekend in September enthralled by the presentation of papers at the virtual 42nd annual conference of the International T.S. Eliot Society. I have been immersed in Eliot’s poetry as a layman for all those years and of course in the Classic Ragtime of Scott Joplin and his collaborators.
I have studied Eliot’s work and also Joplin and his St. Louis ragtime friends. I have even taught the history of St. Louis. However, it took a passing reference to Eliot’s family and his St. Louis home while he was growing up that suddenly joggled all the details together and like a jigsaw puzzle coming together, an image appeared.
To describe the image, let me take you back to Trebor Tichenor’s old stories of ragtime in the Chestnut Valley of St. Louis. That district loosely described was from Market Street on the South to Morgan on the north, Jefferson on the west and roughly around Tucker on the East. It was part of larger African American districts or ones nearby variously known as Death Valley, Mill Valley, and The Ville. It was where ragtime flourished briefly before World War I.
Biographers have thoroughly documented the lives of Eliot and Joplin. The period Joplin and Eliot lived in close proximity only occurred during a brief window of time (1901-1903) bu
