Alexander's Ragtime Band: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" was registered for copyright on 18 March 1911, with the card already crediting both words and music to Berlin[1]. Berlin later said that he first wrote the melody as an instrumental, around 1910, and that the song came to him very quickly[2], but Benjamin Sears and Bradford Conner note that the surviving physical evidence, the copyright card included, gives the piano-solo account no support[1]; an instrumental edition was not issued until 6 September 1911[2]. The singer Emma Carus probably introduced it in Chicago in April 1911, and Berlin, with Harry Williams, presented it at the Friars' Frolic at New York's New Amsterdam Theatre on 28 May[2][1]. Published by the Ted Snyder Company, it became a runaway seller; Berlin's own estimate was about two million copies in its first eighteen months[2].

1851 newspaper engraving of the Boston Brass Band in tall plumed hats playing in a circle under trees

Boston Brass Band, newspaper illustration from Gleason’s Pictorial, 1851. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A brass band of sixty years before the song, shown for atmosphere; it has no connection to it.

The duo Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan recorded it for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on 23 May 1911 (Victor 16908)[3] and again for Columbia in New York on 7 June 1911 (Columbia A1032)[4]; Sears and Conner count six recordings by the pair for six different companies that year[1]. According to The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin, the pair's record spent ten weeks at number one on the popular charts[2]. The song stayed in circulation for decades, with later recordings by Bessie Smith, the Boswell Sisters, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby with Connee Boswell, and Alice Faye sang it in the 1938 film that borrowed its title[2].

Whether it is really ragtime is an old argument. Berlin himself rejected the idea that it was the first ragtime song, though he claimed its chorus was built in a new way that many later ragtime songs followed[2]. In musical terms it behaves like a march, essentially a brisk two-step lightly seasoned with syncopation; judged by the formal pattern of Joplin-era piano rags it falls short, and many modern critics cite this in denying it the label[1]. Charles Hamm took the other side, concluding that it was ragtime all the same, a piece that "helped define the genre for its audiences"; Sears and Conner add that the words portray a band playing ragtime rather than calling the song itself a rag[1].

Find books with Alexander's Ragtime Band for sale →

Sources

  1. Ben & Brad (Benjamin Sears and Bradford Conner): "Alexander's Ragtime Band".
  2. IrvingBerlin.com (excerpt from Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet, eds., The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin): "Alexander's Ragtime Band".
  3. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UCSB): "Victor matrix B-10374. Alexander's ragtime band / Collins and Harlan".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UCSB): "Columbia matrix 19398. Alexander's ragtime band / Collins and Harlan".