Ragtime Annie has come our way thanks to a member’s request of her favorite tune!  I have quite a few audio lesson and play-along tracks below, starting with  a talk-thru and super-slow version (1 & 2).  Always an excellent reference, the Fiddler’s FakeBook (Oak Publications) has a version that I’ve based the medium tempo FFB (Fiddler’s FakeBook) tracks (3 & 4) below.  As mentioned in the Talk-Thru audio lesson, the FFB version has a AABBCCAA song form that I find is not as common as the simple AABB song form I’ve supplied in the uptempo tracks (5, 6, & 7).  Personally, I much prefer the simpler song form and groove, which has a light jazzy swing to it.  A chart is provided below as well.

My improv on the versions below was all first take without much thinking (which is actually the idea with improv!).  Technically and theoretically, or mechanically, as I like to call it, I am basically just circling around each chord using the Major Pentatonic scale of each of the 4 chords in this song, D, G, A, and for a brief moment, C in the A and B sections.  If you are working with the Fiddler’s FakeBook version tracks, the C section modulates to the key of G (G, C & D, which are all chords that have already shown up in the A & B sections, so nothing new there.

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