12th Street Rag: A Three Million Seller

Jeff Barnhart: Well, Hal, I am excited to delve into Euday Bowman’s “12th Street Rag” with you! Before we start chewing over the myriad interpretations that have arisen over the years, I’d like to give a brief background of Bowman and his piece. Euday Bowman was born in 1886 in Texas. By the time he self-published “12th Street” in 1915, he was playing in Kansas City, MO (he’d also written “6th,” “10th” and “11th Street” Rags, referencing streets in KC’s red light district). An interesting aside is that the first section of the rag is almost always omitted, excepting a couple of recordings from 1920 (one notably by the All-Star Trio: George Hamilton Green, xylophone; Victor Arden, piano; F. Wheeler Wadsworth, sax) and an occasional rendering of it by pops orchestras or symphonic bands. It’s the second section that most past and present performers begin with: that ear-worm of a “melody” consisting of only three repeated notes over a duple meter to create a syncopated effect. By the time the virtuosic, but completely unrelated, first section disappeared from the scene, EVERYONE was playing and recording “12th Street Rag!” Sadly, Bowman sold the copyright to his seminal work for $300, thus missing out on the millions of dollars in royalties from sheet music sales and the numerous recordings that would do quite well. A year before his death in 1949,