Dill Pickle Rag: A Song History

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Charles L. Johnson, a Kansas City native who wrote rags, ballads, waltzes and teaching pieces, was associated for several years with the Carl Hoffman music publishing firm, and the Kansas City Public Library notes that many regard "Dill Pickles" as his best-known rag.[1] A library catalog record dates Hoffman's Kansas City edition, a piano rag in G major with a pickle-shaped balloon on the cover, to 1906.[2] A copy is held in the Smithsonian's Bella C. Landauer Collection of Aeronautical Sheet Music, whose page on it observes that people of the day pictured airships as giant pickles, cucumbers or sausages.[3] The Traditional Tune Archive gives 1907 as the year of composition and passes on a story from Jasen and Tichenor's ragtime history: when a Hoffman bookkeeper asked what the piece was called, Johnson noticed a clerk carrying a carton of pickles and named it on the spot.[4]

Photograph of a purple glass pickle jar with a lid, held in an ornate silver-plated frame with tongs

Challinor, Taylor and Company, Pickle jar, pressed purple marble glass, metal, 1870–90. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Record companies soon took it up. Chris Chapman cut a xylophone version with orchestra for Victor in 1908, and Arthur Pryor's Band recorded it in Camden, New Jersey, on February 8, 1909, for Victor 16482.[5][6] The Six Brown Brothers, a saxophone sextet, tried it for Victor between November 1914 and February 1915, but none of their takes was issued.[7] String bands followed: Dr. Humphrey Bate's Possum Hunters, with Oscar Stone on fiddle and Bate on harmonica, recorded it with dance calls on March 3, 1928, for Brunswick 243, and the Kessinger Brothers, Clark Kessinger (fiddle) and Luches Kessinger (guitar), recorded it in New York on February 5, 1929, for Brunswick 315.[8][9]

The tune also passed into the fiddlers' repertoire: Vance Randolph included it in a 1954 list of "traditional" Ozark fiddle tunes, West Virginia fiddler John Johnson learned it from Dorvel Hill of Pigtown, West Virginia, Don Messer & His Islanders recorded it as "Dill Pickles" in 1952, and it appears in fiddle collections such as Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook.[4] Shelley Stevens includes it in Baker's Dozen #10: Ragtime And Honky Tonk, a collection of thirteen ragtime tunes for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning with standard notation and tablature, published by Fingers Of Steel.[10]

Our book that contains the song "Dill Pickle Rag"

Sources

  1. Kansas City Public Library, The Pendergast Years: "Charles Johnson".
  2. York University Libraries, John Arpin Sheet Music Collection: "Dill pickle".
  3. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives: "Dill Pickles".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Dill Pickle Rag".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-6089. Dill pickles rag / Chris Chapman".
  6. Library of Congress, National Jukebox: "Dill pickles rag" (Arthur Pryor's Band).
  7. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-15363. Dill pickles rag / Six Brown Brothers".
  8. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Brunswick matrix AT372-AT373. Dill pickle rag / Dr. Humphrey Bate Possum Hunters".
  9. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Brunswick matrix E29158. Dill pickles rag / Kessinger Brothers".
  10. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #10: Ragtime And Honky Tonk".
  11. Image: Challinor, Taylor and Company, Pickle jar, pressed purple marble glass, metal, 1870–90. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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