With the runaway success of the Maple Leaf Rag in 1899—eventually to sell a million copies—Scott Joplin was the undisputed "King of Ragtime Writers," and what his publisher John Stark wanted him to write were more hits. Stark, after all, had traded his backroom press in Sedalia, MO, for a printing plant in St. Louis on the profitable crest of the Maple Leaf's sales. But even before Maple Leaf's publication, Joplin was seeking to give larger scope to an idiom whose birth he had witnessed and contributed to. Composed in 1899, the Ragtime Dance, an extended ragtime ballet featuring a caller and sung strains interspersed with instrumental interludes, was reluctantly published by Stark in 1902 and, despite Joplin's reputation and the ragtime boom, sold poorly. Discouraged but far from defeated, by 1903 Joplin had completed, and is said to have had once performed in St. Louis, his first (now lost) opera A Guest of Honor. Royalties from Maple Leaf and demand as a teacher afforded Joplin and his new wife, Belle Hayden, the stability of a home—a 13-room house soon to become a boarding house for theater people and musicians—in 1903, though money must occasionally have been spotty, as Joplin set the maudlin lyrics of Little Black Baby by one Louise Armstrong Bristol as a potboiler in that year. By 1903 he was already the composer of such enduring rag classics as Original Rags, The Easy Winners, Elite Syncopations, and The Entertainer (whose melancholy undertow suggests the "laugh, clown, laugh" vicissitudes of satisfying the public), while before the year was out he added Something Doing, a collaboration with his young friend Scott Hayden, and two original compositions: Palm Leaf and Weeping Willow. The latter sets aside the giddy fripperies of the more rhythmically driving rags for a mellow, singing, subtly syncopated soliloquy—the dancing couples of this ostensible two-step are either distant or looming from memory. Its third strain flares into barely sublimated passion, a moment of pure poetry whose mood rises to a valediction in the final strain, with its smile-through-tears chromatic inflections underlined by plunging octaves. Weeping Willow is one of Joplin's most revealing rags—revealing of the composer's richness and depth of feeling as much as of ragtime's capacity for lending it wing. Tellingly, Weeping Willow was published not by Stark but by Val Reis Music Co. in St. Louis—Joplin would return to Stark only with The Cascades in 1904.

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