“Ragtime Annie” is a classic Texas fiddle tune whose first commercial recording was made on July 1, 1922, by Texas fiddler Eck Robertson for the Victor Talking Machine Company — among the very earliest commercial recordings in the country-music corpus. The recording was released later in 1922 (other sources place release in early 1923) and helped establish Robertson as one of the foundational figures in commercial Texas fiddling.
The tune’s earlier origins are murky. Persistent rumors among Texas fiddlers place the tune as having circulated around 1900–1910 before Robertson’s recording, but no firm pre-1922 documentation has surfaced. Some accounts suggest the tune derived from a piano piece called “Raggedy Ann Rag,” but the connection has not been confirmed against any actual surviving piano source.
Robertson’s original 1922 version was structured in three parts (with the third part changing key to G major), as are many older Southwest versions of the tune. The two-part version more commonly heard today is a later simplification. “Ragtime Annie” has crossed comfortably into bluegrass, Western swing, and contemporary acoustic-music repertoires, and remains a regular at fiddle contests and Texas-style jam sessions where the swing-era ragtime feel is at home. The tune is a workshop standard for fiddlers learning the Texas-style ornament vocabulary.
