Annotation:Ruth's Rag
RUTH'S RAG. Old-Time, Country Rag. USA, Missouri. B Flat Major ('A' part) & F Major ('B' part). Standard tuning (fiddle). AA'B. The tune was composed by fiddler Ben Tinnon and named for his wife, (Ruth 1894–1982), who had a local reputation for her skill as a buck dancer and whom Tinnon married in 1910. It was recorded by his group, the Grinnell Giggers, for Victor records on Friday, May 30th, 1930, in a session in Memphis, Tennessee, and they went back to the studio in November of that year and cut another seven sides for Victor.
The group consisted of Tinnon (1891-1974) on fiddle, Melvin Paul (1905-1970) on banjo or mandolin, and Grover Grant (1897-1971) on guitar, and they hailed from Mississippi County, southern Missouri. Their name is explained in this passage (from http://www.1001tunes.com, reprinted at https://oldtimeparty.wordpress.com/tag/grinnell-giggers/)
The Grinnell Giggers were from the area around the Missouri-Arkansas bootheel, near an inlet from the Mississippi River named Big Lake. In fact, the band took its name from a type of fishing done in the area; in the spring of the year, the river would flood, leaving large ponds of backwater. Locals would find in these pools a “trash fish” called grinnel, and they would catch them with old-time three-pronged forks — a practice known as gigging. The term “grinnel giggers” was thus a phrase that had about the same meaning as “Skillet Lickers.” It was not an image, though; most members of the band were cotton farmers and fishermen who had actually done such gigging.