Ragtime Annie

Ragtime Annie was recorded on the day the country record business started. Eck Robertson went back into Victor's New York studio on July 1, 1922, the morning after cutting Arkansaw Traveler with Henry Gilliland, and played six solo fiddle pieces. Sallie Gooden and Ragtime Annie were two of them. That session is the earliest trace of this tune in print or on record. Where Robertson got it, nobody wrote down.

Robertson was a Texas fiddler and the tune has stayed a Texas tune in temperament, even and showy and built to be decorated. Clark Kessinger, the West Virginia fiddler, recorded a version in the late 1920s that shares Robertson's three part structure, so the older shape is well attested between the two of them. Whether either man invented any of it is unknowable. They are simply the earliest fiddlers anyone can still hear playing it.

That third part is where players split. Robertson and Kessinger both play a strain that changes key to G, and older Southwestern versions keep it. Most modern players drop it, and a bluegrass jam that calls Ragtime Annie means the two parts in D. It is left off this page for that reason. A key change in the middle of a tune is something a circle has to agree on, and printing it would make the decision for them.

The two strains have different jobs. The first is a rocking figure on D, F sharp and A that barely moves for three bars and then settles onto the A chord for four. The second climbs the octave and stays up, and it runs sixteen bars instead of eight because its opening four bars come back around in the middle. Played once through, the shape is first strain twice and long strain once.

On a mandolin the first strain almost never leaves the D and A courses, a fine place to work on crossing between two adjacent pairs without the pick catching. The second strain is where the reach happens: A above the staff at the fifth fret of the E course, up to B at the seventh, then long held B and F sharp notes that give the right hand a rest it will need. Count those held notes carefully. They are what makes the strain sixteen bars instead of eight.