12th Street Rag (song)

"Twelfth Street Rag" was composed by Euday L. Bowman in 1914. Bowman was born in 1887 in Fort Worth, Texas, but had run away to Kansas City at age 11. A friend of Bowman's known only as "Raggedy Ed" declared his intention to open a pawn shop on 12th Street 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". The result was "The 12th Street Rag", one of the most famous and best-selling rags of the ragtime era. It was more than 15 years before Bowman actually wrote the music down in manuscript form. He returned to Texas briefly and tried to sell the song to a company in Dallas, but only had an offer of ten dollars for it and was told it really wasn't worth publishing. Returning to Kansas City, he sold it to Jenkins Music Company in 1913. The Jenkins company felt Bowman's arrangement was too difficult and hired 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. It was popular with the early Kansas City bands and became a huge hit after Bennie Moten recorded it for Victor in 1927. It has since become an enduring standard of jazz.

The recording by Pee Wee Hunt was the Billboard number-one single for 1948, selling over three million copies. It was released as Capitol Records 15105 in May 1948.

Euday Bowman, the composer, recorded and published his own recording of the song, on Bowman 11748.

Donald Peers recorded the song in London on March 26, 1949. It was released by EMI on the His Master's Voice label as catalogue number B 9763.

Its structure is: Intro A A1 Intro-2 A2

It has been best known as the theme to The Joe Franklin Show; the version most associated with the program was Big Tiny Little's 1959 recording from his album Honky Tonk Piano (Brunswick BL (7)54049).

In the 1919 short "A Day's Pleasure" by Charlie Chaplin, the African American band is heard playing a version of the popular rag while on the ship.

More recently, a ukulele version has been featured as background music on the TV series SpongeBob SquarePants.