Down Home Rag: A Song History
"Down Home Rag" is the work of Wilbur C. S. Sweatman, and Will Rossiter of Chicago published it as a piano rag in 1911 under the subtitle "It's a Bear!!!"[1] Rossiter also put out a theater-orchestra arrangement by Harry L. Alford the same year, followed in 1913 by a vocal edition with words by Roger Lewis.[2] Sweatman was a clarinetist and bandleader who spent more than two decades in vaudeville, and the publisher of Mark Berresford's 2010 biography of him says he was already playing jazz clarinet solos for audiences before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band cut the records often billed as the first in jazz.[3]
Buffet, Crampon & Cie., Clarinet in A, boxwood, brass with thin gold wash, 1860–65. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
The rag reached records quickly. On December 29, 1913, James Reese Europe led his Society Orchestra through it for Victor in New York, the label calling it a one-step or turkey trot, with a lineup of banjo-mandolins, violins, clarinet, cornet, drums and a piano duo; it was issued on Victor 35359.[4] The Van Eps Trio recorded it in 1914.[5]
Shelley Stevens includes it in Baker's Dozen #10: Ragtime And Honky Tonk, a set of thirteen American ragtime tunes for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, with standard notation and tablature, published by Fingers Of Steel.[6]
Sources
- York University Libraries, John Arpin Sheet Music Collection: "Down home rag: It's a bear!!!".
- IMSLP: "Down Home Rag (Sweatman, Wilbur)".
- University Press of Mississippi / Project MUSE: "Mark Berresford, That's Got 'Em!: The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix C-14247. Down home rag / Europe's Society Orchestra".
- Archeophone Records: "The Product of Our Souls".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #10: Ragtime And Honky Tonk".
- Image: Buffet, Crampon & Cie., Clarinet in A, boxwood, brass with thin gold wash, 1860–65. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.