Ragged Ass Road is a short unpaved residential street in the Old Town section of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.

When a difficult prospecting season yielded little income, convincing residents that they were "ragged ass broke", they decided that that should be the name of the street.

[7] (In her novel Bones Are Forever, American writer Kathy Reichs described the prevailing architectural style of Ragged Ass as "northern hodgepodge".

The road may have started as a narrow alley where residents cut wood to building the barges that carried freight to and from the growing settlement across Great Slave Lake.

[9] By 1957, when Saskatchewan native Lou Rocher settled in the area,[2] it existed and was known unofficially as Privy Road due to the many outhouses along it.

Officially the city still considered the street to have no name, but Rocher made his own signs, replacing them after visiting tourists stole them.

[2] In 1995 former Red Rider lead singer Tom Cochrane named his third album Ragged Ass Road after the street.

The title track of the album described a place "Where the shore fires burn out on a new frontier" and had the chorus "Oh did you find the midnight sun"[A] Down on Ragged Ass Road".

In 2004, a small town in the U.S. state of Ohio mailed a Ragged Ass Road sign back to Yellowknife's city government after having confiscated it from a homeowner as inappropriate for public display.

[2][9][13] The year before, crime novelist and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, a producer of the American television series Bones, had attended the NorthWords literary festival in Yellowknife.

I smelled fishy water and bracken mud and sensed a lake nearby ...The newer homes looked like they'd been assembled from mail-order kits.

Whirligigs, plastic animals, and ceramic gnomes in the yards or topping the fences ... Every house had at least one outbuilding, a rusted tank, and a mound of firewood.

[18][19] Lou Rocher died in May 2013 and was remembered around Yellowknife most prominently for giving Ragged Ass Road its name.