The Easiest Ragtime Pieces — and Why Ragtime Is Not Beginner Music

Every list of "easy famous piano pieces" on the internet puts The Entertainer on it. We measured all 20 ragtime pieces in this library, and the result is worth stating plainly before anything else:

Not one of them scores under 40 out of 100. The easiest ragtime piece here is a 40; the median piece in the whole library is 57. There is no beginner ragtime. Here is the measured list anyway, easiest first.

Why the syncopation is the whole problem

Ragtime sounds cheerful and looks approachable on the page. What makes it hard is a single structural fact: the two hands are doing rhythmically unrelated things, continuously, from the first bar to the last.

The left hand keeps a strict, metronomic alternation — bass note, chord, bass note, chord — and it must not flex. The right hand plays a melody that deliberately lands between those beats. That is what "ragged time" means.

For a beginner this is uniquely difficult, because most early repertoire lets one hand rest, or lets both hands move together, or lets the tempo breathe. Ragtime allows none of those. Your left hand has to become genuinely automatic before the right hand can start being late on purpose. There is no shortcut, and playing it slowly does not make the coordination problem go away — it only makes it manageable to practise.

Where the list starts

The Harlem Rag (40) is the easiest here, and it is also the most historically significant thing on the page. Tom Turpin — born 1871, died 1922, proprietor of the Rosebud Café in St. Louis where Joplin and the other pioneers gathered — composed it by 1892 and published it in 1897, and it is credited as the first rag published by an African American composer. That is a year before ragtime's commercial explosion and two years before Joplin's first rag reached print.

After that it is Joplin nearly all the way down: Elite Syncopations (43), Original Rags (44), The Strenuous Life (44), Something Doing (45), Wall Street (48), Solace (49), and then The Entertainer at 50 — exactly the middle of the scale, and a long way from where the "easy piano" lists put it.

The one that is not really a rag

Solace (49) sits in this list but does not belong to it rhythmically. Joplin subtitled it A Mexican Serenade and built it on habanera and tango rhythm rather than ragtime syncopation, across three of its four strains.

That makes it the gentlest entry point on this page by some distance — not because it is technically easier by our measurement, but because the left hand is not fighting the right. If you want to play Joplin and you are not ready for the coordination, start with Solace.

How to actually learn a rag

Left hand alone, until it is boring. Not until you can do it — until you cannot get it wrong. Use hands-separate mode and play the left hand through the whole piece several times. This is 80% of the work and most people skip it.

Then right hand alone, at the same slow tempo, listening for where the notes land against a beat you count out loud.

Then both, at half speed or less. The moment the left hand starts flexing to accommodate the right, stop and go back. A left hand that bends is the failure mode; it turns ragtime into something that merely sounds approximately like ragtime.

Use the A–B loop on one strain at a time. A rag is built from 16-bar strains, usually AABBACCDD or similar. They are separable, and learning one properly beats learning four badly.

What to play instead, for now

If you came here for The Entertainer and the number 50 has put you off, the honest advice is that it is worth waiting for — and there is a lot to play meanwhile. Pieces you can learn in one sitting is filtered for genuinely easy and genuinely short. The easiest Burgmüller pieces is the best ladder in the library for building exactly the hand independence a rag will demand.

Come back to this page when you can play a Burgmüller study without thinking about your left hand.

Where to go next

What is ragtime? covers the history and the form in more depth, and how to play The Entertainer walks through that piece specifically.

Facts about Tom Turpin from Wikipedia and about Solace from Wikipedia). Difficulty scores are our own measurement of each transcription in this library.