Well before the runaway popularity of The Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 catapulted Scott Joplin to fame as the "King of Ragtime," his activity as a performer and ambition as a composer had made him a father figure to such younger musicians as Scott Hayden and Arthur Marshall, with whom he composed several collaborative rags between 1900 and 1913. Though Joplin's early career was based in Sedalia, MO, syncopated music was everywhere. St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and numberless outposts between, boasted enclaves of black musicians playing in brothels and for each other, "strutting their stuff" in back rooms and private clubs. Blind Tom, Blind Boone, and Tom Turpin are legends as prodigious as the artifacts they left behind are scant. One of the greatest was the Creole musician—variously described as a mixture of Ibo, French, Spanish, Indian, and Mexican—Louis "Bird Face" Chauvin (1883 - 1908). One hardly knew which to admire more—the fluent brilliance of his pianism or the easy abundance of his ideas. Sam Patterson recalled that "When he would first sit down he always played the same Sousa march to limber up his fingers, but it was his own arrangement with double-time contrary motion in octaves, like trombones and trumpets all up and down the keyboard...." Chauvin could play anything he heard but, not content with merely reproducing it, he would play it successively in other keys and with his own embellishments.

In the exercise of this prodigality, Chauvin seldom if ever bothered to write anything down. Thus, his surviving "works" are three potboiler songs, which nevertheless exhibit his richly harmonized style, and the first two strains of Heliotrope Bouquet, taken down by Joplin when he visited Chauvin in Chicago in 1906. Chauvin was living in a bawdy house in the red light district, a youngster with nothing but his genius and an opium addiction, already showing the symptoms of syphilis, the affliction which would also slowly destroy Joplin little more than decade later. Joplin, too, was at a turning point, having recently lost an infant daughter and separated from his wife. In these circumstances, the seductive, mellifluous lilt of Chauvin's strains was captured by the kindly, professorial Joplin and rounded with a valedictory strain of his own, and another which pays tribute to Chauvin's prowess as a keyboard artist, to make one of the most enduringly appealing of ragtime classics.

© All Music Guide