Music ran deep in the Stark family, one way or another. For Etilmon Stark it was the other. The passion that his publisher father had for being responsible for the dissemination of good music was echoed in Etilmon's ability to actually create it, more so than his brother, musically talented pianist/violinist sister and amateur pianist father. But it wasn't always easy being a Stark, to be certain. His given name was quite possibly Etilman, after his uncle who may have gone by that spelling (seen in census records), and which is the more common spelling of that name that could also be shortened to Tilman. However, Etilmon is seen in reference to him in many biographies. His burial record oddly shows Etilmione, which may be a derivation of his baptismal name as reported in They All Played Ragtime, Ethelmonde. We will use the less common but more frequently referenced Etilmon spelling for this essay.

Etilmon was born in Indiana to Kentucky native John Stillwell Stark and his British-born wife Sarah Ann Casey. He was the first of three siblings, including William Paris (1869) and Eleanor Stillwell (1871). One other sibling did not live through infancy. While Etilmon's birth year has been traditionally cited as 1868, his age in the August, 1870, census was three and it was thirteen in June, 1880, thus reinforcing an 1867 year of birth. In 1868 his father had moved the family to Camden, Missouri, to stake his own claim as a farmer, having worked with his brother in that discipline since before the Civil War. As John Stark found farming not suited to his gifts, he instead took up ice cream, still a fairly specialized business given the seasonal availability of ice and absence of mechanical refrigeration in the 1870s. The formula for his ice cream must have been tasty, as he actually did very well, wandering through northwest Missouri in a Conestoga wagon and selling ice cream to any farmer or small town resident he could find.

A panoramic shot of Wentworth Military Academy in the 1910s.

After living in Cameron for a time John moved the family to Chillicothe, Missouri in the late 1870s. It was there that he became a salesman for the Jesse French Piano Company, offering ice cream along with the musical instruments that he readily convinced rural farmers to purchase.

In the 1880 census the Stark family is shown in Chillicothe, with John selling pianos and organs and Etilmon most likely in school. John also took up piano tuning to provide an added incentive for follow-up business. However, carting pianos around got tiresome and Etilmon's father, now in his mid-40s, decided he wanted the customers to come to him. Finding an opportunity in Sedalia, MO, he bought the floundering J.W. Truxel music store in 1886, and set up shop at 516 South Ohio Street in what was to become the "cradle of ragtime."

While Will would join his father in the business eventually named John Stark & Son, Etilmon went a different direction. He had already been studying violin and wanted a career in music. He accomplished this by first becoming a band music major then instructor. His first known assignment was a the Marmaduke Military Academy (now the Missouri Military Academy) located in Sweet Springs, Missouri. The original campus was burned down in the fall of 1896, and even though the school was temporarily placed with the Culver Military Academy, William went to the Wentworth Military Academy (originally the Wentworth Male Academy) in Lexington, Missouri. There he essentially helped to create their band program and formed their first band. In 1897 Wentworth was made a military post of the Missouri National Guard by the state General Assembly, and Stark, among others, was commissioned as an officer of the cadet corps there. As of 1899 he was referred to as Captain E.J. Stark, musical director. He was married to Margaret R. Ryland on June 7, 1898, with her father, a "minister of the gospel," presiding. In November 1899 she gave birth to their first child, Margaret Eleanor, the latter in honor of the grandmother Etilmon never met. The family appears in Lexington, Missouri in the 1900 census with Etilmon listed as a music teacher.

Stark held his position at Wentworth until at least 1905. While there, he not only scored a large number of arrangements for his bands, but penned the W.M.A. Cadets' March as well in 1898. Understandably taking advantage of his father's new profession as a publisher of ragtime music, particularly that of Scott Joplin, E.J. started submitting some of his own works. It has long been known that John Stark's standards for what he published were, for the most part, consistently high. Whether he published E.J. submissions based on the familial connection or on merit is not clear, but his works should have passed the merit test. The first of these was Trombone Johnsen: Rag-Time Cakewalk in 1902, available in piano, band and orchestral arrangements. This was followed in 1903 by a slow two-step in 4/4 time, Kyrene. Margaret gave birth to another daughter in 1902, Sarah Eleanor, and a son in 1904, Etilmon J. Jr..

In 1905 E.J. left Wentworth and found work as a musical instructor, as well as working with orchestras, and for his father. He started arranging works from the Stark catalog both for piano and ensemble, one of the earliest being the Black Cat Rag by Frank Wooster and Ethyl B. Smith (later sold off to Jerome H. Remick). When their father moved to New York for a few years, Will became the general manager of the St. Louis office, and Etilmon became a staff arranger and composer. Among the composers whose works he arranged was his sister-in-law, Will's wife, Carrie Bruggeman Stark. As she later noted, she admitted to not being able to notate her own works, and that she had written more songs than she could even remember, although very few of them actually made it into print. That which did get published was usually completed by Etilmon, published under her name or the pseudonym Cal Stark. She would play the piece for him and he would notate it for typesetting and production.

Given the public's perception of the high quality of the Stark name, and the relatively low volume of his own works, it is curious why Etilmon chose to release two pieces under the pseudonym Bud Manchester. The first, from 1907, was Brain-Storm Rag, which had an eye-catching cover of a wild-haired pianist extracting all kinds of noise out of an upright piano, with notes flying and falling over and even running away. The rag itself is of fair quality for that time. However, It is an unusual entry because this fantastical art is unsigned (or the signature is covered by the Stark logo), and it also represents a kind of manic whimsy that is not entirely congruous with the images on much of what the company published. Then again, James Scott's Ophelia Rag came out just a little later with a great Clare Dwiggins cartoon on the cover, so perhaps it was the younger management in St. Louis that helped push these things through.

The 1910 census shows Etilmon and the family at 1441 Cutter Avenue near modern day Forest Park, and he was listed as a music teacher with an orchestra. Whether this means he was teaching orchestra or also working with one is unclear, but it may have been both. In 1912 his second Bud Manchester piece, Clover Blossom Rag, a fine work, was released. The following year would see publication of perhaps E.J.'s finest syncopation, Billiken Rag. It had a mysterious classical feel to it, opening with a cascade of octaves and arpeggios in a minor key, resolving into a happier syncopated section. The title came from an unusual Buddha-like charm doll created by St. Louis art teacher Florence Pretz, something she conceived of in a dream that was to bring good luck to its owner. The Billiken is now the mascot of both St. Louis University and their high school.

One of Etilmon's most important and enduring contributions to ragtime came in 1912 (other years from 1909 to 1915 have been cited, but 1912 is likely correct) with the publication of Fifteen Standard High Class Rags. This was a folio of orchestrations for an 11 piece ensemble, with seven by Scott Joplin (one co-composed with Scott Hayden), four by James Scott, and one each by Joseph F. Lamb, J. Russel Robinson, Maurice Kirwin and Arthur Marshall. Some of the arrangements dated back several years before the folio was released. While E.J. did not orchestrate all of them, as he had help from St. Louis musician David Socrates DeLisle, and an arrangement of Frog Legs Rag by Scott Joplin, he did manage most or all of the Joplin contributions. It has been reported that New Orleans musicians who used this folio referred to it as the "red back book," due to the hue of the back cover. That name has since stuck to the collection.

This was one of the first orchestral folios of ragtime, and certainly the first featuring Joplin rags, so it did fairly well. Some of the first recordings of arrangements from this book were done by New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson in 1947, on the cusp of the first big ragtime and traditional jazz revival. The more famous set of recordings, primarily of the Joplin pieces, came about through the efforts of conductor Gunther Schuller in 1973, who recorded an album titled The Red Back Book. These same arrangements caught the ear of film director George Roy Hill, and even though he was not able to retain Schuller for his latest project, he did manage to get the orchestrations for adaptation by Marvin Hamlisch for the 1973 film The Sting. Among those was, of course, Etilmon's original conception of Joplin's The Entertainer, which was little changed from the original arrangement more than six decades after it was first introduced.

The year 1913 was a busy one for E.J. as he turned out several other works as well, including a waltz and a tango co-composed with a friend, La Mode. In They All Played Ragtime, it is said that he also wrote the libretto for an opera composed by his father, but as it has not surfaced this remains as more of a curiosity. Some of the titles are known, however it was never printed. Another tango, the whimsical Chicken Tango, would emerge in 1914, adopted as the "official number for the great State Tango Tournament" that same year. While most of these types of pieces of that era were, in reality, habaneras, they were still regarded as part of the popular tango dance craze of the early to mid-1910s. There would be two more works that were published in 1917, one of them a patriotic piece, We Are Coming, Uncle Sammy, to lyrics by E.J.'s father John. He continued to push out orchestral arrangements into the late 1910s.

In the 1920 census, Etilmon and his family were shown to be living at 7377 Maple Avenue in Maplewood, a western suburb of St. Louis. He would remain there for the rest of his long life. John had been living with them for several years following the death of Sarah Stark. He was still listed as the proprietor of a music publishing company, even though his son Will had taken over most of the operations by this time. Etilmon was listed as a pianist in a moving picture theater, but it is possible that he was still giving private lessons. Little is known of his activities through the 1920s, but his father died in October, 1927, leaving the operation of Stark & Son Music in the hands of Will and Carrie. Within a few years they would repurpose the company into what it started as, moving from the Laclede Avenue building to a plant at Vandeventer Ave, and reverting back to a print jobber available for large printing jobs.

Etilmon, Jr., did not go into the music world, instead training to become a pharmacist. In the 1930 census he is shown to be a druggist, likely working for the Harper Pharmacy company in St. Louis. Etilmon Sr. had also shifted gears, literally, as he was now the proprietor of an engine piston ring manufacturing company. At some point in the early 1930s, the older E.J. would become an inspector of automobile engines, and later for an electric products manufacturing company, retaining that title through at least 1943. By 1935, the younger E.J. was a vice president of Harper Pharmacy, and in the early 1940s he would become president and treasurer or that company. As of the 1940 enumeration taken in St. Louis, Etilmon, Jr., was still living with his parents, listed as the proprietor of a retail drug store, and the elder as an inspector of auto pistons, possibly for the St. Louis Car Company which built large mass transportation vehicles.

In 1949 E.J. was located in St. Louis by researchers and authors Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, who were preparing the book They All Made Ragtime. They were able to get much of the family history from Etilmon and Carrie Bruggeman Stark, who had recently been widowed by the death of Will earlier in the year. While some of the information was not spot on, it still formed a major part of the foundation of that pioneering text, so their contributions are invaluable in regard to not only the Stark publishing history, but to ragtime in general. The 1950 census showed Etilmon and Margaret in Maplewood, and he was listed as a supplier of wholesale piston rings. Etilmon J. Stark died on January 2, 1962, at age 94. He is interred near his parents in St. Peter's Cemetery in St. Louis.