Boogie-Woogie

By: Eric Bennett

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Boogie-Woogie

African American folk style of piano-playing that emerged in the early twentieth century and persisted into the 1930s and 1940s, when it influenced the development of jazz and rhythm and blues.

The origin of boogie-woogie is lost in the unwritten history of black Southern bars and bordellos, although its birthplace is often cited as the logging camps of Louisiana and Texas. “Bunk” Johnson, “Jelly Roll” Morton, and Leadbelly, and other musicians claimed to have heard boogie-woogie in Texas around the turn of the century, roughly the same time that bluesman W. C. Handy reported its appearance in Memphis, Tennessee. Native Texas bluesman Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, born in 1913, claims to have heard it in church as a child.

Boogie-woogie involves strong rhythmic bass notes played like the left-hand part in Ragtime. Particular to boogie-woogie, however, is its rhythm's rolling feel, which includes eight beats a measure instead of the more common four. Some Jazz historians hypothesize that this rhythm adapts to piano the bass figures in guitar and banjo playing. Early boogie-woogie adhered to the conventions of Blues, following a twelve-bar pattern and drawing melodic (right-hand) lines from blues songs. Boogie-woogie sometimes incorporated Latin American styles, influenced by the tangos, rumbas, and sambas that entered the United States through New Orleans, Louisiana.

For the first three decades of the twentieth century, boogie-woogie developed as a vernacular music. It appeared in the repertoires of pianists in Jook Joints and on the “honky-tonk trains” that transported African American factory workers and their families north and south during the Great Migration that followed World War I (1914–1918). Indeed, for some listeners the constant, crowded rhythm of boogie-woogie evokes the clicking and clacking of a train.

Jimmy Yancey, groundskeeper for the White Sox at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, is considered the father of the genre. Yancey performed expert variations at small Chicago clubs such as the bar of fellow pianist Cripple Clarence Lofton. Yancey did not record his music, however, until 1939, ten years after his followers had begun to release their own boogie-woogie singles. One of Yancey's most talented disciples, Meade “Lux” Lewis, celebrated Yancey and his music in the 1938 composition “Yancey's Special.”

The term boogie-woogie first entered popular usage with the release of “Pine Top's Boogie-Woogie” by Clarence “Pine Top” Smith in 1928. The cut appeared with other songs by Smith on Vocalion Records in Chicago. Although Smith died the following year, his and Yancey's success made Chicago the surrogate home of the Southern genre. Boogie-woogie emerged as the music of choice during Chicago's rent parties of the Great Depression era, when apartment residents raised money by featuring musicians in their homes.

Boogie-woogie entered the jazz mainstream after two “Spirituals to Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City in the late 1930s. It became a thread woven into more sophisticated jazz compositions by Count Basie, the Will Bradley Orchestra, and others. Boogie-woogie was also a primary influence on the development of the Kansas City big-band sound, as well as the Rhythm and Blues (R&B) style that, in the 1950s, developed into rock and roll.

Since the 1950s boogie-woogie has continued to evolve as a corollary to jazz. Notable late recordings include the work of Rocket 88 in the 1970s as well as German Axel Zwingenberger together with Lionel Hampton and Big Joe Turner in the 1980s.

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