Joseph [Joe] Lamb was an American ragtime composer born of Irish Catholic parents in Montclair, New Jersey. He was taught music very young first by his father, a carpenter, and then by his elder sisters. His father died when he was thirteen and he went to St. Jerome's College in Ontario to be trained in engineering. His greatest interest however was music and wrote compositions which were published in Toronto in the early 1900's. He eventually moved to New York to work for a publisher during which time he met his idol, Scott Joplin quite by chance. During their first meeting, Joplin invited Lamb to perform his rag Sensation at a private gathering the very same evening. As a result Joplin put Lamb in contact with his publisher, John Stark who from then on published nearly all of Lamb's work.
In 1911 he married and moved to Brooklyn where he made arrangements, ran a ragtime orchestra and wrote his best ragtime compositions. In 1914 he started work in a financial organisation and his music became his hobby. He vanished from the musical scene to re-emerge briefly in the late 1950s after the book They All Played Ragtime was published. On his retirement in 1957 he started reworking his rags written after the 1910's and they were posthumously published in 1964.

Websites:
	Joseph F. Lamb	Biography and list of works by "Perfessor" Bill Edwards