The Minnesota Rag by Axel Christensen (1913)

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Original listing and sheet music here: https://musescore.com/user/36482158/scores/26832817?from=youtube_share
Another rag, and a good one at that, to add to the collection of state rags, although this rag was actually named after a boat, the SS Minnesota, upon which composer Axel Christensen (1881-1955) spent a delightful week cruising the Great Lakes from Chicago to Buffalo. As the cover reminds us, Christensen was "Known in Vaudeville as the 'Czar of Ragtime'". But in real terms he did do much to propagate and support the concept of ragtime through his piano teaching schools which eventually grew into a large number of individual schools in which hundreds of thousands of students studied over the years. As ragtime lost popularity in the late 1910s he persisted with promoting it until eventually conceding that jazz had taken over. He was based in Chicago and in addition to teaching was also a performer and publisher of a magazine, the Ragtime Review, which was well-known in the ragtime era. He also composed, writing original rags and parodies of classical pieces, later adding a few novelty scores in the 1920s. This rag was self-published in 1913 and was reprinted in the December 1914 edition of the Ragtime Review.

Original score source was from the Library of Congress at this link:
https://www.loc.gov/item/2023864275/
This is a reproduction of the original score which surprisingly needed a fair number of corrections in the form of missing accidentals.

Axel Christensen playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWv_HHmWjvjVFvKBmxkHxC8AsTAgJcEoD

State rags, rags named after states:
https://musescore.com/user/36482158/sets/13553779

Thank you to JohnJ1995 for the stately suggestion and for compiling the state rag list.

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