Black Walnut Rag is a typical ragtime composition designed to showcase jaunty rhythms and syncopated melodies. It uses a standard AABBACCDD form common to the genre.
Focus on consistent timing for the off-beat accents to achieve the desired rhythmic bounce.
Comparable difficulty and character — good candidates for what to learn next.
Black Walnut Rag is rated Henle level 3 of 9 — late beginner repertoire, roughly ABRSM grades 4–5. In the RCM system it corresponds to about level 3.
You should be comfortable at Henle level 3 — meaning you can already play level 2–3 pieces cleanly. Learning it one level early is possible as a stretch piece, but more than that usually leads to months of frustration.
A typical performance of Black Walnut Rag lasts about 3 minutes.
Black Walnut Rag is available as free public-domain sheet music on IMSLP — the score is linked directly from this page.
Pieces at a comparable difficulty and character include 24th Street Rag by Cameron Lee Simpson, Bullseye Rag by Cameron Lee Simpson, Banana Pepper Rag by Cameron Lee Simpson — see the full similar-pieces list on this page.