The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #44549   Message #656523
Posted By: AR282
23-Feb-02 - 10:36 PM
Thread Name: Scott Joplin and Treemonisha
Subject: RE: Scott Joplin and Treemonisha
To Dicho

I never said Lottie Joplin was the old lady that didn't know anything about Joplin. She was his wife after all. This old lady I refer to lived in the 70s when Joplin became popular after "The Sting" (Lottie was long since dead). She was a distant relative (Joplin had no children that survived him) and so became the legal inheritor of the estate.

But she knew nothing about the legal ramifications of heading an estate and didn't care. She was just some old lady who was given a little money by the lawyers that were really running the whole thing and she was happy enough with that. She had nothing to lose by going along with it. So she certainly was not going to fight these lawyers. As I said, she admitted that she knew nothing of Joplin's music. She was just a figurehead put there so that it didn't look like the Joplin estate were really nothing but greedy lawyers (a redundancy--I know).