In 1908 a new publishing house, Seminary Music in New York (which inhabited the same building as the firm that launched Irving Berlin's career), jumped on the robust Scott Joplin bandwagon; among the first Joplin piano rags issued by the newcomer was Pine Apple Rag, today a favorite of countless listeners who recognize it as one of the items used by composer Marvin Hamlisch and director George Roy Hill in the 1973 film The Sting.

Pine Apple Rag takes up the same reworked European dance blueprint as nearly all Joplin's other rags—a four-bar introduction (which in this case introduces the actual main theme, something that not all the introductions do), an opening tune that returns for another go after a second idea has run its course, and then a change of key and a pair of new thoughts. There are moments in Pine Apple Rag that rival, in terms of sheer infectiousness, the best that Joplin, or any other ragtime musician, ever wrote. The second strain is one of them: it is syncopated through and through, the individual off-beat accents jelling together as boisterous little groups of three eighth notes against the common-time rhythmic backdrop. The final, coda-type phrase grows from a chromatically-altered harmony that, while hardly groundbreaking in a global sense (considering what, halfway around the world, the likes of Scriabin, Schoenberg, and Mahler were up to in 1909), is striking in its own rag-ish way.

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