"Twelfth Street Rag" is a

ragtime Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott J ...

musical composition published by Euday L. Bowman in 1914.

Background

A friend of Euday Bowman known as "Raggedy Ed" declared his intention to open a

pawn shop A pawnbroker is an individual or business (pawnshop or pawn shop) that offers secured loans to people, with items of personal property used as collateral. The items having been ''pawned'' to the broker are themselves called ''pledges'' or ...

on 12th Street in Kansas City while the two were walking along it. Bowman is rumored to have said "If you get rich on those three balls, I'll write a piece on three notes to make myself rich." It was more than 15 years after Bowman composed the song before he actually wrote the music down in manuscript form. He returned to Texas briefly and tried to sell the piece to a company in Dallas; but he only had an offer of ten dollars for it and was told it really was not worth publishing. Returning to Kansas City, he sold it to Jenkins Music Company in 1913. The Jenkins company felt Bowman's arrangement was far too difficult however, hiring C. E. Wheeler to simplify it. With a big advertising push "12th Street Rag" began to sell better. In 1919, James S. Sumner added lyrics. The song was popular with early Kansas City bands and became a hit after

Bennie Moten Benjamin Moten (November 13, 1893 – April 2, 1935) was an American jazz pianist and band leader born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. He led his Kansas City Orchestra, the most important of the regional, blues-based orchest ...

recorded it for RCA Victor in 1927, the same year Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven recorded it.

Other recordings

Euday Bowman, the composer, recorded and published his own recording of the piece, on Bowman 11748. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven recorded the song for Okeh Records in Chicago in May 1927. Krazy Kat and his orchestra perform the music in the 1930 cartoon '' The Bandmaster''. A recording by Pee Wee Hunt was the '' Billboard'' number-one single for 1948, selling more than three million copies. It was released as Capitol Records 15105 in May 1948. Donald Peers recorded the song in London on March 26, 1949. It was released by

EMI EMI Group Limited (originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records Ltd. or simply EMI) was a British Transnational corporation, transnational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in March 1 ...

on the

His Master's Voice His Master's Voice (HMV) was the name of a major British record label created in 1901 by The Gramophone Co. Ltd. The phrase was coined in the late 1890s from the title of a painting by English artist Francis Barraud, which depicted a Jack Russ ...

label as catalogue number B 9763.

Popular culture

The song is perhaps best known in the US and UK as the theme to '' The Joe Franklin Show''; the version most associated with the program was

Big Tiny Little Dudley "Big Tiny" Little, Jr. (August 31, 1930 – March 3, 2010)
Thedeadrockstarsclub.com, accessed March 2010 wa ...

's 1959 recording from his album ''Honky Tonk Piano'' ( Brunswick BL (7)54049). A brief excerpt of the song can also be heard about 37 minutes into the 1996 film ''

The English Patient ''The English Patient'' is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of the Second World War. The four main characters are: an unrecognisably burn ...

''. Since 1999, a steel guitar version has been featured as

background music Background music (British English: piped music) is a mode of musical performance in which the music is not intended to be a primary focus of potential listeners, but its content, character, and volume level are deliberately chosen to affect behav ...

on the U.S. TV cartoon series by

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (often shortened to Nick) is an American pay television channel which launched on April 1, 1979, as the first cable channel for children. It is run by Paramount Global through its networks division's Kids and Family Group. It ...

, ''

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.'' The Rastrelli Cello Quartet recorded a version for four cellos in 2006, on the album ''Vol. 1 - Concerto Grosso A LA Russe''.

Background

Other recordings

Popular culture

See also

References

Further reading