"A Guest of Honor" was a ragtime opera that Joplin experimented with. It may have spun out of his work with "The Ragtime Dance". I believe his two brothers, Robert and Will--both famous vaudevillians, helped Scott to stage it and it received good response and this encouraged Joplin to keep exploring opera.

Unfortunately, Joplin couldn't get a publisher for "A Guest of Honor" (Stark wouldn't touch it--he didn't even want to publish "The Ragtime Dance" except that his daughter Nellie--who loved Joplin--twisted his arm) and it fell by the wayside and is now lost. That's too bad. It would be extremely interesting to hear. I imagine it probably sounded like the stuff in Treemonisha that was raggy such as "We're Goin' Around", "Aunt Dinah Has Blowed the Horn", "A Real Slow Drag" and so on. Treemonisha, I should point out, is NOT a ragtime opera but an opera with some ragtime in it.

Whether Joplin recycled anything from "Guest" is not known. In short, we know next to nothing about "A Guest of Honor". A lot of Joplin's stuff has been lost and we don't even know how much.

"Pretty Pansy Rag" is lost, for example, but we know definitely that Joplin composed such a piece. One newspaper article from 1901, I believe, mentioned a Joplin composition called "A Blizzard" but no other mention of it exists and no trace of the piece itself has ever been found. Joplin and Lamb collaborated on a rag once and I would kill to hear it. Unfortunately, Stark wouldn't publish it because he and Joplin had had a falling out and Lamb gave up trying to find a publisher. It is now lost. What an incredible shame!

In 1971, a pianola expert named Albert Grimaldi was rummaging around in an old pianola he had purchased 15 years before and let sit in his garage. He found some extra piano rolls stuffed away in it. One was "The Silver Swan Rag" and it was "attributed to Scott Joplin" (and has since been confirmed to be genuine Joplin). No date on it although it is now believed to be from 1914--the last year Joplin published any rags.

Anyway, if you locate a copy of "A Guest of Honor" don't lose it!!!!! You have a one-of-a-kind piece of music that you will be offered a large sum for. But don't count on finding it any time soon. My boss believes a mnauscript might exist somewhere in the attics and archives of old money. Could be. But who do you start with and where?