I found this delightful tune by searching archive.org for "town" and filtering for audio + years that would be in the public domain.
It was recorded by the Louisiana Five in 1919 or so and is attributed to Lada & Spencer. Since it has no lyrics you are free to imagine that it is about the /topic in #tildetown.
Listen to it on archive.org here.
Recording technology was not very good back then and this reproduction of it has quite a lot of surface noise. So, it was hard for me to hear what the chords really are. I'm sure I wrote them wrong in several places but they mostly work. As for the melody, most of the variations are up to the performer.
Speaking of performances, I decided to record it myself. Very possibly I'm the first person to do so since 1919. I did it with two tracks, both acoustic guitar, in a sort of jazz manouche style. I think it sounds OK given that I just learned it tonight and some of the chords are kind of off.
Listen to my recording here. (Or grab a flac copy.)
