Less is not always more. In the case of Ethyl B. Smith there was supposed to have been more, but we simply can't confirm that, having to do with less instead. While not a complete mystery, there are still many unanswered questions about this somewhat talented lady composer and piano instructor. Attempts to pin her down in city directories and census records proved daunting, considering her common last name. However, persistence won out and now at least something more is known of her. It should be noted that there was an Ethel E. Smith in Saint Louis, Missouri, that worked as a music teacher for many years in the early 1900s, but she was not the person discussed here — just a confusing coincidence.

Ethyl B. Smith was born in Emporia Kansas to Albert D. Smith and Mary Della Terry. She had four other siblings, including Nellie M. (9/28/1879), Bessie P. (7/1883), Adalbert George (2/11/1885) and younger brother Harry (12/30/1889). The family had moved from Kansas before the 1895 state census was taken, and they were found residing in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1900 census with Albert employed as an insurance salesman and the two eldest children also working.

Ethyl's first piece, Black Cat Rag (co-composed with Frank Wooster) was published in St. Louis in 1905 when she was 18 years old. Wooster was a Missouri native who was two years older than Ethyl. In the 1900 census he was working as a collector for a hat shop. Black Cat Rag was published by Wooster, who already had a couple of pieces printed through a jobber with his moniker and picture on the front. Wooster ended up taking off for New York in 1907 where he established a new, but short-lived base for his fledgling company.

Ethyl remained in St. Louis. Her next piece was Fontella Rag, published by Thiebes Stierlen in 1907, and named for Fontella Club, with two locations in St. Louis. With only three known compositions it was likely she was working in some other profession at that time. She also appears to have married at some point between 1907 and 1909, but the identification of her spouse remains a mystery.

As of the 1910 census Ethyl was divorced, using her maiden name, living with her mother and younger brother Harry, and working as a hairdresser with her recently widowed older sister Nellie. Albert was nowhere to be seen, but Della does not appear to have been widowed yet. Harry was working as a musician at that time, and it turns out he was a pianist, possibly doubling on other instruments. The family was living at 3815 Windsor Place, but would soon move to 5252 Delmar avenue, just three miles west of where Scott Joplin had lived a few years before. Ethyl did manage one more piece, a classically-styled waltz, In the Vienna Woods, in 1911, published by the Thiebes Piano Co. Her sister Nellie passed on in late 1912. As of the 1917 draft Harry was working as a musician at Walsh's Cafe at the intersection of King's Highway and Delmar in St. Louis, and listed his mother as needing his support. He was also living with his mother at the same address in 1920, still working as a musician but now married, possibly to his oldest sister's 18-year-old daughter Gladys. This point was difficult to confirm.

Ethyl, in the mean time, had moved out on her own, and in the 1913 and 1914 Gould's Saint Louis directories listed music as her profession. She was employed as a piano instructor for one of the Axel Christensen studios of ragtime and popular music in the Missouri capitol, Jefferson City as of 1918 owing to an announcement in his advertising, as well as an independent advertisement placed by Ethyl. Given that the fortunes of many of the Christensen branches started to fade around that time, there is a chance that school was not open in 1920 when the census was taken. The Christensen announcement stated that she was a "composer of several well-known rags, songs and instrumental numbers." Who knew these pieces well if at all? Other than Smith herself, that contention remains one of the mysteries, as no such confirmed works have surfaced at any time in the last several decades of ragtime research.

While Ethyl's one-time composer peer, Frank Wooster, ended up back in St. Louis working in a shoe factory, he soon became a successful advertising salesman in Ohio and Chicago in subsequent decades. Ethyl, on the other hand, appears to have simply faded out of view. Her death certificate from St. Louis Baptist Hospital in 1930 shows that Ethyl had potentially still been working as a musician and teacher until she was no longer able. She died at age 41 of breast cancer and tumors that had metastasized in many other parts of her body over a period of several years. Ethyl was buried in Saint Louis Memorial Park. Ethyl and Frank's Black Cat Rag remains popular enough today that it has commonly been offered as a mobile phone ring tone for cat lovers.