In 1877, a German choirmaster named Julius Weiss fled Port Jervis, New York, owing debts advertised six times in the local paper, and resurfaced in Texarkana, Texas, tutoring a lumberman's children in piano, violin, and German. On the side he taught an eleven-year-old Black neighbor, Scott Joplin, free of charge: ear training, harmony, and an evident love of opera. Joplin never let the debt lapse, sending money for years after moving to New York. Weiss's later record complicates the kindly-teacher story: archival historian Marcello Piras found him running as a Texarkana bank president who absconded with as much as $50,000 in 1889. Two historians who went looking for Weiss's own teacher, decades apart, found nothing -- one traced a family claim of a "University of Saxony" education to three schools' archives and came up empty; the other could place him only within a broad German choral tradition, no name attached.