“Rag-Time Parade” was originally made for the Louisiana State University Dance Group during a summer teaching residency in Baton Rouge. It premiered there on June 27, 1950. Later that year, Cunningham taught the dance to six beginning students from his New York City technique classes, who performed it once at Cooper Union, on November 24, 1950, and two days later at Kaufmann Auditorium. It was not done again until August 1953, when it was performed by Cunningham’s newly formed company on one of their inaugural programs at Black Mountain College. Carolyn Brown described the work as “a crazy, funny dance full of movement gags and non sequiturs and silliness, performed absolutely straight-faced in our flea-market attire.”