'The Strenuous Life' (a Ragtime Two Step) was written in the same year as Joplin's more famous The Entertainer - 1902, and is a tribute to Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech of April 11, 1899 which began with the austere words 'I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labour and strife'. One might have expected a minor key rather foursquare musical response from Joplin, but the opposite is the case with one of his...