This is in response to the article by Albert Petrak on "The Hootchie
Kootchie Dance".  This rang a bell for me as I was wondering the same
thing a few years back.

By a fortunate coincidence, I am a friend of David Jasen who is an
extraordinary scholar with many definitive books on ragtime and popular
music.  I asked Dave, and he told me what he knew.  Like I say, that
was a few years ago so I called up Dave and asked him again.  No new
information has surfaced, so here is the story:

This tune can be traced back to the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 that
was held in Chicago to commemorate Columbus' Voyage in 1492.  (They
had 400 years to plan this thing and they were still a year late.)

One of the attractions was a belly dancer named Little Egypt.  It was
here that the song was introduced to America.  While it is possible
that it was a folk melody from Egypt, there is no limit to other
explanations.  According to Dave, who has one of the greatest sheet
music collections in existence, the song was never published.  Of
course, this is absolutely amazing since the song was wildly popular
then and here we are today still talking about it.

Dave says he has never even seen a reference to its being published,
so it probably never was -- at least with a title that anybody can
recognize.  And if it was published with an obscure title before it
became a hit, don't you think that it would be re-titled immediately?
The whole idea of music publishing is to sell as many copies as
possible (no kidding), and how can they sell it if people can't find it?

Like I say, this is just one of those mysteries that nobody has
answered yet, and now you know the few facts that do exist.  As for the
lyrics, many versions exist and it seems that people would write them
for their own amusement.

Randolph Herr