That Mysterious Rag

[1] It was one of the earliest Berlin songs to become a commercial success[2] with recordings by Arthur Collins & Albert Campbell and by the American Quartet being very popular in 1912.

[3] According to Howard Pollack in a biography of George Gershwin, "That Mysterious Rag" was one of a trio of songs written by Berlin in 1911 that revolutionized American popular music, the others being "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Everybody's Doin' It".

[4] Until the publication of this song ragtime had been so distinctively an African-American musical genre that the occasional rag whose lyrics and cover art indicated some other ethnicity would focus instead on some other marginalized group (usually Jewish or Italian) and apply the dichotomy toward comic effect.

[5] With "That Mysterious Rag", notes Irving Berlin biographer Charles Hamm, ragtime music first sees cover art of a fashionably dressed white couple and lyrics that lack distinctive ethnic markers in dialect or syntax.

[5]"That Mysterious Rag" is the first instance of a change that Berlin employs consistently from 1912 onward: a generic style lacking in specific ethnic connotations whose audience is no longer solely the working class, but whose reach includes patrons of the legitimate theater.