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The Hee Haw Haystack Fiddlers performs "Ragtime Annie" on Hee Haw.

The Hee Haw Haystack Fiddlers performs "Soldiers Joy " on Hee Haw.

This traditional Old-Time tune can be heard from the hills of the Appalachian Mountains across the great plains, Canada and beyond. If you're a beginner player, this is a great song to have in your repertoire. 

Many of the songs played at the Old Time Music Jam are based on Scotch Irish Fiddle Tunes.  Ragtime Annie, however, may have a quite different origin.

This song was recorded several times in the 1920's by such luminaries as Eck Robertson from Texas, Dudley Vance from Tennessee and Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers (with Posey Rorer on fiddle) in the early 1920s. In some cases the song was known as Ragtime Annie Lee, or the Ragged Ann Rag. 

Del Wood, incidentally, had a piano version from circa 1951 which he called Ragtime Melody (Del, by the way, was an early  influence on one Jerry Lee Lewis, who grew up to be a pretty fair piano player himself).   Oddly there seem to be no lyrics to this song.  

 It's another one of those songs that sounds like it might have been used on an early Warner Brothers cartoon, but I haven't been able to identify any cartoon that might have used it.  

From the title, we can guess that the song may have been composed in the ragtime era of the 1890's to the early 1900's.  If so, it is probably an indigenous American composition, since ragtime was more or less invented in America as a fusion of African rhythms and European melodies, as a precursor to jazz and rock and roll. Many of the songs at the Brew Pub actually have elements of ragtime and jazz. 

As an American song, it would be less unusual for it to have been composed as a purely instrumental tune.  Almost all Scotch-Irish fiddle songs have lyrics. 



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