As early as 1908, Joplin had begun mentioning work on his second opera, Treemonisha. The amazing spate of new, classic rags—the demotic speech of ragtime wrought into high art with an infinity of sweetness, lyricism, and gaiety distilled into the straitlaced rag form—continued into 1910 with the publication of Stoptime Rag, after which no original composition would appear until Joplin's New Rag in 1912, the arch title signaling the return of "the King of Ragtime." But things had changed in the interim. The ragtime boom, set off by Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag in 1899—which eventually sold over a million copies—provoked a plethora of cheap imitations, simplistic in conception, vacuous in expression, and—above all—far easier to play. Teachers and "schools" of ragtime proliferated, with an emphasis on quick results. 1911 marks a watershed, with the publication of Irving Berlin's song Alexander's Ragtime Band. Joplin had already acquiesced to the new trend with a vocal arrangement of his Pine Apple Rag the year before to doggerel by one Joe Snyder—"Hear me sigh, hear me cry for that Pineapple Rag, What a dream, it sure does seem like Heaven when we drag"—with little success, given that his pianistically conceived flights seldom lend themselves readily to vocal rendition. Ragtime had emerged from the demimonde of bordello and saloon entertainment, become socially acceptable largely on the strength of Joplin's realization of "classic" rag, and, after a decade of holding the limelight, was being pushed into the penumbra of marginal, specialist, insider music by a frantic commercialism peddling syncopated music (e.g., Ragging the Scale) designed to sell quickly and be superceded by the next week's sensation. In this milieu, Joplin's conception of ragtime as art music met with impatience, as the oblivious composer pursued his obsession with Treemonisha, whose vocal score he issued under his own imprint in May 1911. The Joplin/Hayden collaboration Felicity Rag, issued by Joplin's sometime champion John Stark in 1911, probably predates its publication by several years, while Reflection Rag, brought out by Stark in 1917, some months after Joplin's death, had very likely been composed a decade before. Thus, Joplin's New Rag is the last of his rags to embody the cresting dance-likeness of ragtime's golden era, though the second strain's turn to the minor and the uneasy chromaticisms of the last foretell the tragic intensity of his final ragtime composition, the manic-depressive soliloquy Magnetic Rag issued by Joplin in 1914.

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