John Stillwell Stark

Biography

John Stillwell Stark became a respected music publisher whose support preserved the work of ragtime composers, and his firm in St. Louis ensured that the joyous, expressive sounds of the age were widely distributed.

He spent his later years safeguarding those compositions for future audiences, and when he left this world in 1927 he was remembered for the tireless devotion with which he nurtured an entire musical genre at Saint Peter's Cemetery.