They sold their first big hit, All Aboard for Dixieland, for $100 in 1913,[2] but the two had been writing songs as early as 1909, beginning with Moonlight Makes Me Lonesome For A Girl Like You.

[3] Cobb's most famous work is Russian Rag, a composition based on the opening chord progression of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op.3, No.2.

The piece was such a hit in 1918 that Cobb wrote The New Russian Rag in 1923 in an attempt to arrange more of the Rachmaninoff prelude for ragtime piano.

[1] By 1917, Cobb began writing a monthly column titled "Just Between You and Me" in The Tuneful Yankee, a ragtime music magazine owned by publisher Walter Jacobs.

This article about a United States composer born in the 19th century is a stub.