Maple Leaf Rag about the sales of the "Maple Leaf Rag", for example that 1 million copies of the sheet music were sold in the composer's lifetime, making Scott Joplin the first musician to sell 1 million copies of a piece of instrumental music. Joplin's first biographer Rudi Blesh wrote that during its first six months the piece sold 75,000 copies, and became "the first great instrumental sheet music hit in America". However, research by Joplin's later biographer Edward A. Berlin demonstrated that this was not the case; the initial print-run of 400 took one year to sell, and under the terms of
Maple Leaf Rag on seven piano rolls for use in mechanical player pianos. All seven were made in 1916. Berlin theorizes that by the time Joplin made these recordings he may have been experiencing discoordination of the fingers, tremors and an inability to speak clearly, symptoms of syphilis, the disease that took his life in 1917. The recording of "Maple Leaf Rag", on the Aeolian Uni-Record label from June 1916 was described by biographer Blesh as "shocking ... disorganized and completely distressing to hear". Berlin notes that the "Maple Leaf Rag" roll was "painfully bad" and likely to be the truest record of