From Good Space on Facebook
When Emporium Pies opened in 2012, the building owner David Spence and his team at Good Space created the sheet-music mural that runs between the pie place and the neighboring shop.
On a recent stroll, my daughter stopped to look at it. She began humming and said “I don’t know what it is.” She’s a music genius. She did not recognize the tune because it wasn’t Mozart or Messiaen … or Phoebe Bridgers. Lucky for her, I — and my definitely not-trivial knowledge related to the few square miles of real estate surrounding us — was there to fill her in.
The mural in question represents a piece by Scott Joplin, a pioneering composer who lived in East Texas and who, according to a social-media share from Good Space, died the same year the houses-become-small-businesses on Bishop were erected.
Scott Joplin via Wiki commons
It’s the first grand stanza of Joplin’s 1898 ragtime staple Maple Leaf Rag (played here by the composer himself, it’s catchy and familiar, no matter what my kids says). Joplin also wrote The Entertainer, which was one of the first (and probably the last) piano songs I actually learned to play in fifth grade.
Noted Good Space in a 2012 album covering the entire process of installing the mural, “it was the best-selling sheet music ever when the streetcar first arrived at Bishop Ave. in 1903.”
Joplin died — pretty tragically at the young age of 48 — on the first day of this month 105 years ago. At the time of his death, he was penniless and demented from neurosyphilis. But in 1970, after a re-release of his songs and use in a 1977 movie soundtrack, he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Musicians are still recording new spins on his music.
And there’s no better Oak Cliff way to honor his memory than to freshen-up the mural installed 10 years ago, according to a new post from the Good Space people.
“The mural is an exact enlargement of the original circa-1899 sheet music,” they note, “which even includes a notational error.”
Workers replaced several panels of cement-based siding, repainted the base and filled in missing notes. Check it out at 314 North Bishop.
