4
Although the most typical early rock ’n’ roll form is not the blues but the verse-and-refrain hokum song, the musical style that, more than any other, propelled rock ’n’ roll into being is the boogie-woogie, a subspecies of the blues characterized by a “walking” ostinato bass line. Developed by African American pianists in the early years of the twentieth century, boogie-woogie emerged as a distinct genre in the late 1920s; a decade later it was taken up by left-wing intellectuals and popularized by swing bands. By the early 1940s, the boogie-woogie had become a national sensation, but it faded from mainstream pop after World War II, lingering on in rhythm-and-blues and country music.
The boogie-woogie bass line was a foundation of postwar R&B, powering such proto-rock songs as “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “Rocket 88.” Boogie-woogie bass lines were also a staple of early rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly, as on Elvis Presley’s 1957 hit “All Shook Up.” But boogie patterns in rock were not confined to the bass register. On Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” the second line of each verse (“We’ll have some fun when the clock strikes one,” “If the band slows down we’ll yell for more,” etc.) has a boogie melody. On Larry Williams’s 1957 rock ’n’ roll classic “Bony Moronie,” a saxophone and guitar play a typical boogie figure in response to Williams’s vocal line.
In some cases, the difference between swing-era boogie-woogies and 1950s rock ’n’ roll is merely a matter of instrumentation and lyrics. If the horns on Gene Krupa’s “Drum Boogie” were replaced by guitars and the word “boogie” changed to “rock,” the 1941 hit would hardly be distinguishable from a rock song. In fact, Danny and the Juniors’ 1957 rock ’n’ roll standard “At the Hop” rides practically the same bass line.
Many of the earlier piano boogies also have a rock feel. Big Joe Turner’s 1938 debut record, “Roll ’Em Pete,” with pianist Pete Johnson, rocks much harder than Turner’s actual rock ’n’ roll hits of the 1950s, with their relatively stiff combo arrangements. Romeo Nelson’s “Gettin’ Dirty Just Shakin’ That Thing,” from 1929, could easily be imagined as a rocker if the African American dialect were not so thick and the piano rhythms so sophisticated.
Piano boogie devotees disdained the pop boogies of the 1940s and had no use for rhythm-and-blues or rock ’n’ roll. “Every dance band featured synthetic boogie, popular songs based on the idiom were soon common and some of them were worthy forebears of the moronic rock songs of the 1950’s,” wrote the British jazz critic Max Harrison in 1959.[1] Youthful rock fans, on the other hand, had no memory of the boogie era and only latched on to the word “boogie” in the late 1960s after the band Canned Heat revived the guitar boogies of John Lee Hooker, which were not really boogie-woogies at all.
Still, it’s hard to understand how the resemblance between pop boogies and early rock ’n’ roll could be so widely overlooked, except in terms of a cultural clash between a generation sobered by depression and war and the rebellious teens who came after them. To the rock pioneer Chuck Berry, the relationship is obvious. “The nature and backbone of my beat is boogie,” he writes in his autobiography. “Call it what you may . . . it’s still boogie as far as I’m connected with it.”[2]
Like jazz and blues, the boogie-woogie, or at least the boogie bass line, can be traced back to the ragtime era. But the boogie-woogie did not attract scholarly interest until white listeners discovered it in the late 1930s. The New Orleans–based composer and musicologist William Russell published the first serious essay on boogie-woogie in 1939, consisting mainly of biographical sketches.[3] The German-born jazz critic Ernest Borneman researched the origins of boogie-woogie in the mid-1940s, while he was living in Canada, and published the results in 1957.[4]
Perhaps the first published example of a boogie bass line occurs just before the final chords of Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony, written in 1893, during the composer’s American sojourn. Already known for using Czech folk music in his work, Dvořák incorporated elements of African American spirituals into the New World Symphony, notably the famous “Goin’ Home” theme of the second movement. But like the jazzy walking bass section in that movement—anticipating the innovations of Walter Page, Count Basie’s bassist, by some four decades—the brief snatch of what sounds like boogie-woogie at the end of the fourth movement is apparently a fluke.
Since one type of boogie-woogie bass line is built on the habanera rhythm, Eubie Blake’s recollection of Jesse Pickett playing “The Dream” in the late 1890s ranks among the earliest boogie citations. Blake also recalled an obese pianist in Baltimore named William Turk, who “had a left hand like God. . . . He could play the ragtime stride bass, but it bothered him because his stomach got in the way of his arm, so he used a walking bass instead. I can remember when I was thirteen—this was 1896—how Turk would play one note with his right hand and at the same time four with his left. We called it ‘sixteen’—they call it boogie-woogie now.”[5]
Reminiscing in the May 1949 issue of The Record Changer magazine, H. B. Kay claims that as a teenage newsboy in the racially mixed Tenderloin District of Manhattan, he heard young black pianists play boogie-woogie bass lines, which he calls “8-beats,” in the late 1890s. “The 8-beat was known to that part of New York before the Spanish American War,” he says. “The Alabama Negroes were the personification of syncopation in most everything they did, including their traditional 8-beat.” Kay adds that the celebrated black vaudeville team of Bert Williams and George Walker used boogie rhythms in their revue at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall during the fall and winter of 1898–1899, saying that “Walker, a nimble buck and wing dancer . . . did some entirely new steps to the 8-beat knocked out on three pianos.”[6]
In 1939, Richard M. Jones, best known for his composition “Trouble in Mind,” told Down Beat magazine’s correspondent Onah L. Spencer how he’d heard a pianist called Stavin’ Chain at Bully Reynolds’ TP Saloon in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. “Chain walked into that saloon one night—it was still 1904—and sat down at an old piano,” said Jones. “I was a youngster but I remember him. He started rambling around on the keyboard, then he told some onlookers he was going to play a tune he called Lazy Rags which featured a lot of walking bass. I’m telling you, customers started coming into that saloon like gangbusters when they heard him go. ‘Roll that walkin’ bass, Papa Stavin’ Chain. Roll it a week,’ I remember them all shouting.”[7]
In his 1938 Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton demonstrates how Tony Jackson played “Michigan Water Blues,” which he claimed (in a letter to Robert Ripley the same year) that Jackson had performed in 1905. “Then they’d do the single—single running bass,” Morton adds, playing a boogie-woogie bass line. “Then they’d do what they call a double running bass there,” he continues, playing a boogie-woogie bass line with each note repeated.[8]
In 1946, Leadbelly told the record producer Ross Russell that he’d heard boogie-woogie piano as a teenager in Shreveport, Louisiana, around 1906. “Boogie-woogie was called barrelhouse in those days,” he said. “One of the best players was named Chee-Dee. He would go from one gin mill to the next on Fanning St. [actually Fannin Street]. He was coal black and one of the old-line players, and he boogied the blues.” Leadbelly mentioned another pianist, Pine Top Williams, to the jazz critic Charles Edward Smith. “He played that boogie woogie,” Leadbelly said. “That’s where I got that bass—on Fannin’ [sic] Street. And that’s what I wanted to play on guitar, that piano bass.”[9]
Ernest Borneman writes that Tony Catalano, a white cornet player, heard Charlie Mills, a black pianist, play boogie-woogie on riverboats near New Orleans in 1907. Borneman gives no attribution, but one of the principals of the Streckfus steamship company confirmed that Catalano did play in a band with Mills on the riverboat J.S. around that time.[10] Mills later recorded with ragtime bands but not in a boogie style.
In his autobiography, Born with the Blues, the black vaudeville performer Perry Bradford (best known for convincing OKeh Records to record Mamie Smith singing his composition “Crazy Blues”) writes that “St. Louis, Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati and Louisville had a gang of piano sharks. From these ‘Hotspots’ where ragtime piano men were making the natives hug and kiss each other and shouting for more and more; along with those piano fiends in Texas who only played the after-beat bass style (what was called the Texas roll); and Birmingham’s Lost John, the man who came to Chicago in 1908 beating out nothing but lost chords; all this was the same stuff that Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis laid on New Yorkers at Carnegie Hall, which the Broadway slickers nick-named Boogie-Woogie.”[11]
Borneman writes, again without attribution, that “in 1909, W. C. Handy heard Seymour Abernathy, Benny French and Sonny Butts at the Monarch, on Beale Street, and at Mulcahey’s saloon in Memphis, playing the blues with ‘eight to the bar boogie-woogie pre-influence.’”[12] French was evidently the same pianist Jelly Roll Morton called Benny Frenchy, whom Morton said he’d encountered at the Monarch Saloon on Beale Street in Memphis around 1908. But when he demonstrates Frenchy’s piano style on his Library of Congress recordings, Morton plays a striding ragtime bass line, without a hint of boogie-woogie feeling.[13]
Pianist James “Stump” Johnson said that that the boogie was created by a St. Louis pianist named Son Long. “He never had a chance to record but he was the originator of what they call the boogie woogie,” Johnson told Paul Oliver. “He was born around and lived around 15th and Morgan at that time, and I used to hear him there. That was the coloured limelight.”[14] Johnson, born in Clarksville, Tennessee, in 1902, could not have heard Long earlier than about 1909, when Johnson’s family moved to St. Louis.[15]
Around this time, boogie-like bass lines began to appear in published ragtime compositions. The last section of Scott Joplin’s “Pine Apple Rag,” from 1908, contains an eight-note bass figure that’s rhythmically identical and melodically similar to ones found in boogie-woogie. Joplin’s “Solace,” from 1909, makes substantial use of habanera rhythms, and the “Alabama Bound” section of Blind Boone’s “Southern Rag Medley No. Two,” also from 1909, features a vaguely boogie-ish walking bass.
A few measures of walking bass in the final part of Artie Matthews’s “Pastime Rag No. 1,” from 1913, barely hint at boogie-woogie. But the second part of Matthews’s “Weary Blues,” from 1915, features an unmistakable boogie-woogie bass line in the context of a twelve-bar blues chorus—the first passage of full-blown boogie in print. The trilled introduction foreshadows the opening of Pinetop Smith’s “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” while the melody over the walking bass anticipates Paul Williams’s 1949 rhythm-and-blues hit “The Huckle-Buck.” “Weary Blues” was extensively recorded from the 1920s through the 1950s, usually without the boogie bass line, by artists ranging from Clarence Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, and the McGuire Sisters. But that bass line, which has become the most common boogie-woogie pattern to this day, is what gives “Weary Blues” its enormous though virtually unrecognized influence.
The distinction of having written the first blues with a boogie-woogie bass line is usually given to George W. Thomas, who published his “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” in 1916, with an ascending four-note bass figure rather than the more typical ascending and descending eight-note figure found in “Weary Blues.” In 1923, Thomas sold “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” to Clarence Williams, who recorded it in July of that year with singer Sara Martin and in October with his own Blue Five band. The Blue Five’s instrumental version swings harder, and when the riffing horns—including Sidney Bechet’s soprano saxophone—wail the blues over the vamping boogie figure, there’s a faint but definite rock ’n’ roll feeling. Williams later claimed that he’d first heard Thomas play “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” at a theater in Houston in 1911. “At that time he called it the ‘Hop Scop Blues,’” wrote Williams, “because of the rolling, hopping bass.”[16]
In April 1917, Wilbur Sweatman recorded an original composition titled “Boogie Rag,” but it bears no resemblance to the boogie-woogie. Also in 1917, Eubie Blake published and made a piano roll of “The Charleston Rag,” featuring an un-boogie-like walking bass line that descends like the one in Artie Matthews’s “Pastime Rag No. 1.” Blake claimed to have composed the piece in 1899, before he learned how to write music. The famous African American violinist and composer Will Marion Cook heard him play the tune around 1905 and dubbed it “Sounds of Africa.” He took Blake to a New York publisher, who offered buy it, but the deal fell through when the hot-tempered Cook took racial umbrage at an innocent remark, delaying the publication of “The Charleston Rag” for years.[17]
The first pop song to use a walking bass—though not a boogie-ish one—was “Dardanella,” published in 1919, with music by Felix Bernard and Johnny S. Black and words by Fred Fisher, who was also the publisher. Bandleader Ben Selvin’s instrumental recording of the tune was a huge hit in 1920. Soon afterward, Jerome Kern composed the Hawaiian-flavored “Ka-Lu-A,” featuring a very similar repeating figure, and Fred Fisher sued for copyright infringement. In his 1924 decision, the eminent jurist Learned Hand ruled for the plaintiff, finding that “the defendants have been able to discover in earlier popular music neither this figure, nor even any ‘ostinato’ accompaniment whatever.”[18]
“The Fives,” composed by George W. Thomas and his brother Hersal Thomas, was copyrighted in 1921 and issued by George’s publishing company in Chicago the following year. The lyrics, by George Thomas, are about a train, and the chugging rhythms prefigure those of later boogie-woogies. The music has a few frilly ragtime passages, with stride bass accompaniment, but it’s dominated by boogie beats, with a variety of walking bass lines, among them a rising-and-falling eight-note pattern in a twelve-bar blues passage. Like the boogie figure in “Weary Blues,” it’s essentially an arpeggiated major sixth chord with each note played twice—what Jelly Roll Morton referred to as a “double running bass.”
“The Rocks” was recorded for the OKeh label in February 1923 by a pianist using the name Clay Custer—thought to be George W. Thomas, who is credited on the label as the composer. Although it uses the blues form only intermittently and contains snatches of stride bass, it is generally regarded as the first boogie-woogie recording. Like “The Fives,” it features a number of different walking bass lines, including habanera figures and the same sort of double running bass as on “Weary Blues” or “The Fives.” The next month, Fletcher Henderson recorded “Chime Blues,” a piano solo featuring chiming effects and a “Weary Blues”–style boogie-woogie bass line.
Hersal Thomas, more than twenty years younger than George, had followed his brother from Houston to New Orleans and then Chicago, where he made a piano roll of “The Fives” in 1924. He made two solo recordings in 1925, “Suitcase Blues” and “Hersal Blues,” while recording more extensively as an accompanist to his sister, Sippie Wallace, and his niece, Hociel Thomas. Before his sudden death in July 1926, at the age of nineteen, Hersal Thomas was a popular entertainer at South Side rent parties and a prime influence on his Chicago-born peers Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis, who would become standard-bearers of the boogie-woogie movement.[19]
William Russell wrote that “Hersal played all the favorite blues and was known especially for his own Suitcase Blues. In those days if a pianist didn’t know the Fives and the Rocks he’d better not sit down at the piano at all. Whenever Hersal Thomas, who made a deep impression on young Ammons, came to a party, the other pianists were afraid to play; so he became unusually popular and got all the girls.”[20]
Meade “Lux” Lewis mistakenly attributed “The Fives” to a pianist from St. Louis, although he was apparently referring to Hersal Thomas. “This man played The Fives,” Lewis said. “It was something new and it got Ammons and me all excited. (Sure wish I could remember his name.) The best way to describe his way of playin’ is to say that the right hand played The Fives while the left hand didn’t matter. You could play any kind of left hand—a rumble bass, a walkin’ bass, and so on.”[21]
In September 1923, pianist Eddie Heywood recorded “The Mixed Up Blues,” featuring a prominent boogie-woogie bass line toward the end of the piece. Little is known about Heywood’s background except that he played in Atlanta theaters and was a graduate of the Boston Conservatory of Music.[22]
Jimmy Blythe, a Kentucky-born pianist who moved to Chicago sometime between 1915 and 1918, cut “Chicago Stomp” in April 1924. Basically just a series of blues choruses accompanied by a walking bass, plus a short introduction and coda, it’s considered to be the first pure boogie-woogie to be recorded. The melody on the first chorus is reminiscent of the “Huckle-Buck” theme in “Weary Blues,” and all but the last two choruses use the “Weary Blues” boogie bass line. Many of the melodic figures from “Chicago Stomp” turn up in later boogie-woogies, and despite its plodding rhythms, the piece as a whole is clearly a rock ’n’ roll ancestor.
The boogie-woogie may have reached its mature form in Chicago, but its geographical origins are uncertain. Boogie antecedents were reported in New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Memphis, and Houston, among other places. Scott Joplin, born in Texas, was living in Sedalia, Missouri, when he wrote “Pine Apple Rag”; Blind Boone’s “Southern Rag Medley No. Two” is subtitled “Strains from the Flat Branch,” referring to a district of Columbia, Missouri; Artie Matthews, born in Illinois, published “Weary Blues” in St. Louis. Two of the most significant boogie pianists, Cow Cow Davenport and Pinetop Smith, hailed from Alabama.
The consensus among historians, however, is that the boogie-woogie first emerged in Texas or Louisiana. In 1939, E. Simms Campbell wrote that “Boogie Woogie piano playing originated in the lumber and turpentine camps of Texas and in the sporting houses of that state. . . . In Houston, Dallas and Galveston—all Negro piano players played that way.”[23] But Campbell was a cartoonist—one of the first successful African American commercial artists—and not a musicologist. And he gave no attribution for his statement, which appears in the context of a highly subjective essay on the blues that was published in the same influential book, Jazzmen, as William Russell’s essay on boogie-woogie.
Born in St. Louis, Campbell was educated in Chicago and made his career in New York, where he befriended jazz musicians and published a “Night-Club Map of Harlem.” For his blues essay he interviewed Clarence Williams, a Louisiana native who was a teenager performing in a vaudeville show in Houston when he met the older George W. Thomas. When he republished Thomas’s “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” in 1940, Williams commented in the annotation that “the ‘Boogie Woogie’ originated in Texas many years ago. It wasn’t called the ‘Boogie Woogie’ then. George Thomas was the fellow who used this style and first wrote it down.”[24]
In the same song folio, Williams recalls “playing piano for a boarding house maintained for turpentine workers in a little town called Oakdale, La., near the borderline of Texas.”[25] He notes that Thomas played piano to accompany silent movie screenings in Houston, but he does not place Thomas at any lumber or turpentine camps. According to the blues scholar David Evans, Thomas was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1883 but had moved to Houston by 1900.[26]
In his book A Left Hand Like God: A History of Boogie-Woogie Piano, Peter J. Silvester writes that “during the 1890s, large-scale lumbering operations started in the western Louisiana/eastern Texas area.”[27] Silvester describes how the black workers used shacks built on railroad cars and furnished with pianos as rolling barrelhouses, which were moved along newly laid rails as the logging progressed further into the forest. But there seems to be no account of any early boogie-woogie pianist actually playing in such a shack.
The musician most often cited to substantiate the connection between lumber camps and boogie-woogie is Eurreal “Little Brother” Montgomery. Born in the sawmill town of Kentwood, Louisiana, in 1906, he began playing piano at the age of five. Many of the itinerant pianists who entertained at the nearby honky-tonk his father ran also played at the family’s home; Montgomery later recalled the names of more than a dozen of them—most from Louisiana or Mississippi, all virtually unknown today except for Jelly Roll Morton. Montgomery’s recordings of their material—such as “Crescent City Blues,” which he adapted from “Loomis Gibson Blues”—contain occasional walking bass lines.[28]
“We were playing all those kind of basses down there, way before ever it came out on records,” Montgomery maintained. “I used to only play a walking bass with one finger then, but after I got up around twelve, fourteen I could double up and play with all of my hand. We called it Dudlow Joe.” At the age of eleven, he had run away from home to play piano professionally. “My first job was at a juke joint in Holton, Louisiana,” he said. “I moved on to Plaquemine, Louisiana, where I played for five or six months for a fellow called Tom Kirby at a cabaret. . . . Then I left there and went to Ferriday, Louisiana, and played for Ed Henderson at Henderson’s Royal Garden.”[29]
For the next ten years, Montgomery played in what he called nightclubs or barrelhouses in small towns around Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, as well as in New Orleans. In recounting his early career, he doesn’t mention performing at lumber or logging camps until the mid-1920s. The blues singer and guitarist Big Joe Williams remembered playing with Montgomery at a camp in Electric Mills, Mississippi, but Montgomery said he did not meet Williams until 1926.[30]
The backgrounds of many of the first boogie-woogie pianists are obscure, and though some of them might have played in lumber or turpentine camps before 1920, only Will Ezell is actually reported to have done so.[31] Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1896, Ezell is said to have been the regular pianist in the sawmill town of Haslam, Texas, near the Lousiana border, around the time of World War I.[32] Speckled Red, born Rufus Perryman in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1892, was living in Detroit before he returned to the South in the late 1920s, when it is claimed that he played in sawmill camps.[33]
Of the few other known boogie pianists born before 1900—old enough to have made an impact before the publication of “Weary Blues” or “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues”—even fewer were from the rural South. Cripple Clarence Lofton was born in Kingsport, Tennessee, in 1887 and worked in tent shows before moving to Chicago around 1917. Cow Cow Davenport, born in Anniston, Alabama, in 1894, honed his craft in urban honky-tonks and traveling shows. Doug Suggs was born in St. Louis in 1894 but made his career in Chicago. Jimmy Yancey was born in Chicago in 1898 and didn’t learn to play piano until he was about sixteen years old, by which time he had toured the United States and Europe as a vaudeville singer and tap dancer, even performing for the king and queen of England.
The Texas lumber camp theory of boogie origins probably started with E. Simms Campbell’s interpretation of remarks by Clarence Williams. But the boogie-woogie, an offshoot of ragtime, more likely developed in the same urban areas where ragtime flourished, and was then disseminated into the hinterlands. By the late 1910s, walking bass lines were surely being played by pianists in lumber and turpentine camps, as well as levee camps, tent shows, taverns, brothels, and vaudeville theaters.
Although a few of the early boogie musicians had some musical education—Jimmy Blythe, for example, studied with the ragtime composer Clarence M. Jones in Chicago—most are thought to have had little or no formal training.[34] Cow Cow Davenport said that the boogie beat “was originated by uneducated pianists.”[35] Jelly Roll Morton’s friend Roy Carew concurred: “I would say that Boogie Woogie was the bad little boy of the rag family who wouldn’t study. . . . More crude than Pine Top’s efforts, such music never got played in the ‘gilded palaces.’”[36] According to Eubie Blake, “The higher-class fellows who played things from the big shows looked down on this music. Nobody thought of writing it down. It was supposed to be the lower type of music, but now it is considered all right.”[37]
By the late 1920s, most of the major and minor boogie-woogie pianists were living or had lived in Chicago, including Jimmy Yancey, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Albert Ammons, Hersal Thomas, Jimmy Blythe, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Doug Suggs, J. H. “Freddie” Shayne, Charles Avery, Montana Taylor, Romeo Nelson, Little Brother Montgomery, Cow Cow Davenport, Pinetop Smith, and possibly Turner Parrish, Will Ezell, and Charlie Spand. In 1927, Meade “Lux” Lewis made his first recording, the classic “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” but it was not released for a couple of years. Also in 1927, Jimmy Blythe made a piano roll of “Boogie Woogie Blues,” the first known use of the term “boogie woogie” in a song title.
Pinetop Smith arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1928. Born near Troy, Alabama, in 1904, he began his career in Birmingham; after moving to Pittsburgh in 1920, he toured the Midwest and South in vaudeville shows, singing and dancing as well as playing piano. According to William Russell, Smith lived in the same Chicago rooming house as Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis, and the three shared Ammons’s piano. Smith auditioned for Mayo Williams, possibly at Cow Cow Davenport’s instigation, and in December 1928 recorded “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” backed with “Pine Top’s Blues,” for Vocalion.
Much of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” consists of spoken instructions on how to dance the boogie-woogie: “Hold yourself, now! Stop! Shake that thing!” But nearly all of it rides an ascending walking bass pattern—four doubled notes, eight beats to the bar—similar to the one in “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” (or, for that matter, to the one in Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up”). Smith borrowed the trilled opening of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” from Hersal Thomas’s introduction on Sippie Wallace’s 1926 recording of “Special Delivery Blues,” which features Louis Armstrong on cornet. He took the main theme—a treble figure repeated over the walking bass—from a motif that appears near the end of Jimmy Blythe’s 1925 recording of “Jimmie Blues.” The same theme was published as part of a 1925 composition titled “Syncophonic No. 4” by Axel Christensen, a Danish-American pianist from Chicago who ran a nationwide chain of ragtime schools. Christensen took a different theme in “Syncophonic No. 4” from Blythe’s 1924 piano roll of George W. Thomas’s “Underworld Blues.” In 1927, Christensen published Blythe’s “Chicago Stomp” under his own name, crediting Blythe as his co-composer; soon afterward he republished it as “Walking Blues,” and later as “Boogie Woogie Blues,” without crediting Blythe at all.[38]
“Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” was a smash hit, and it lent its title to a whole musical genre. Among the many recordings it inspired are Roosevelt Sykes’s “Boot That Thing,” Romeo Nelson’s “Head Rag Hop,” Charles Avery’s “Dearborn Street Breakdown,” and Montana Taylor’s “Detroit Rocks,” all from 1929. But Pinetop Smith did not have long to enjoy his success; less than three months after his landmark recording, on the eve of his next studio date, he was accidentally shot to death at a dance. He was twenty-five years old and had cut a total of eight sides.[39]
This first boogie-woogie boom coincided with the hokum craze sparked by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s October 1928 recording of “It’s Tight Like That,” one of the best-selling “race” records of the era. “It’s Tight Like That” follows the twelve-bar verse-and-refrain model of Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Shake That Thing,” the same structure used on such prototypical rock songs as Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” Little Richard’s “She’s Got It,” and Chuck Berry’s “Reelin’ and Rockin’.” Tampa Red’s boogie guitar lines, partially duplicating the melody sung by Haley on “Rock Around the Clock,” lend an indisputable rock ’n’ roll flavor to risqué couplets such as “The gal I love, she’s long and slim / When she whip it, it’s too bad, Jim.”
In December 1928, just days before Pinetop Smith’s historic session, James “Stump” Johnson recorded “The Duck’s Yas-Yas-Yas,” another influential hit. Here Johnson plays stride piano, not boogie, but his lyrics are pure hokum, typified by the title verse: “Mama bought a rooster, she thought it was a duck. / She brought him to the table with his legs straight up. / In come the children with the cup and the glass, / To catch the liquor from his yas-yas-yas.” The song was further popularized by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, who recorded it in May 1929, and by the St. Louis cornetist Oliver Cobb, who recorded it with his jazz band, the Rhythm Kings, in August 1929.
In October 1929, Romeo Nelson recorded “Gettin’ Dirty Just Shakin’ That Thing,” the flip side of “Head Rag Hop.” Paraphrasing Stump Johnson’s words over a driving boogie beat, Nelson sings, “Hey, mama killed a chicken and she thought he was a duck, / [Put him] on the table with his heels cocked up. / Old folk, run and get your glass, / Catch the juice from the two black bass.” At the end, he displays the range of his influences, first singing, “Clap hands, here comes Nelson,” a reference to the white “ukulele ace” Johnny Marvin’s 1926 pop hit “Clap Hands! Here Comes Charley,” and then, “Too tight, just won’t right now,” alluding not to “It’s Tight Like That” but to Blind Blake’s “Too Tight,” also from 1926.
Another example of hokum-boogie fusion is Speckled Red’s September 1929 recording of “The Dirty Dozen,” an expurgated adaptation of an African American insult game. Like “Gettin’ Dirty Just Shakin’ That Thing,” it uses boogie bass runs and—with the line “[If] you can’t shake your shimmy, shake your yas-yas-yas”—makes explicit reference to Stump Johnson’s song. But “The Dirty Dozen” was a much bigger hit than “Gettin’ Dirty Just Shakin’ That Thing,” inspiring cover versions by artists ranging from Kokomo Arnold to Count Basie. In his Library of Congress interviews, Jelly Roll Morton claims that the song originated in Chicago, where he heard it “about 1908.” But the obscene version he demonstrates bears little resemblance to Speckled Red’s recording except for the tag line “Yo mammy don’t wear no drawers,” which Red renders as “Yo mama do the lordy lord.”[40]
Intriguingly, one of Red’s verses, “Yonder go yo mama goin’ across the field, / Runnin’ an’ a-shakin’ like an automobile. / I hollered at yo mama and I told her to wait. / She slipped away from me like a Cadillac eight,” turns up on Bo Diddley’s hard-pounding 1957 rocker “Hey! Bo Diddley” as “Saw my baby runnin’ ’cross the field, / Slippin’ an’ slidin’ like a automobile. / Hollered at my baby, done told her to wait. / Slipped out from me like a Cadillac eight.”
In 1930, Speckled Red recorded a sequel, “The Dirty Dozen No. 2,” with another hokum song, “The Right String, but the Wrong Yo Yo,” on the flip side. That song is loosely based on Eddie Green’s composition “You’ve Got the Right Key, but the Wrong Keyhole,” recorded in 1924 by singer Virginia Liston with Clarence Williams and his Blue Five, featuring Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. Adapting the lyrics to suit the yo-yo fad that had taken hold in 1929, Red changes Liston’s line “Yesterday I went down to the hardware store / And put another lock on my front door” to “Passed yesterday by the hardware store. / Bought a brand new string to fit my yo-yo.”
“You’ve Got the Right Key, but the Wrong Keyhole” is apparently based on “You’re in the Right Church but the Wrong Pew,” written by the African American lyricist Cecil Mack and composer Chris Smith for Bert Williams and George Walker’s 1908 Broadway show Bandanna Land.[41] The song was recorded that year by Eddie Morton, a white vaudevillian who often covered Bert Williams’s songs, and became a major hit in 1909 when it was recorded by Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan, the leading blackface duo of the day.
“The Right String, but the Wrong Yo-Yo” was revived in 1950 by Speckled Red’s younger brother Piano Red (Willie Perryman) and became an R&B hit the following year, although it preserved much of the old-fashioned vaudeville feel of Speckled Red’s original, with its primitive-sounding walking bass lines. In 1956, Carl Perkins recorded a rockabilly-style “Right String Baby, Wrong Yo-Yo,” for Sun Records, which released it only as an album track in 1958. Under the name Dr. Feelgood and the Interns, Piano Red scored a minor pop hit when he recorded the song again, with a more modern sound, in 1962. Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, a British rock group that predated the Beatles, covered it in 1964, as did Gerry and the Pacemakers, another British group. In 1969, the Beatles made a rehearsal tape of “Right String, Wrong Yo-Yo,” which was later bootlegged. Shortly before his death in 1985, at the age of seventy-three, Piano Red recorded the song once more, this time with country singer Danny Shirley, and it made Billboard’s country singles chart.
With the onset of the Depression, record sales plummeted, and few boogies were recorded until the mid-1930s. A peculiar exception is the piano introduction to “Jam House Blues,” recorded in December 1933 by Gene Austin, the leading white pop crooner of the 1920s. Charlie Segar, a black pianist born in Florida and based in Chicago, cut an altered version of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” for the Decca label in January 1935, titled simply “Boogie Woogie.” But it was Cleo Brown’s March 1935 rendition for the same label, also titled “Boogie Woogie,” that catalyzed the genre’s resurgence. Brown, born in Mississippi and based in Chicago, was a suave stylist, and she turned Smith’s piece into a virtuoso vehicle, revving the piano part to warp speed (and changing the bass line to the ascending and descending “Weary Blues” figure) while delivering the recitation with silky-smooth insouciance.
John Hammond was producing records and writing magazine articles when he encountered Albert Ammons on a trip to Chicago in late 1935. “Ever since 1928, when I first heard Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith’s original boogie-woogie piano, I had been fascinated by this eight-to-the-bar left-hand blues style, which had never been recognized by white audiences,” Hammond wrote in his autobiography. “And when I heard a record of ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues’ in 1931 I knew I had found the ultimate practitioner in Meade Lux Lewis. But no matter where I looked, or whom I asked, I couldn’t find him. Now years later in Chicago, I raised the question again while chewing the fat with Albert Ammons. ‘Meade Lux?’ said Albert. ‘Why sure. He’s working in a car wash around the corner.’ And so he was!”[42]
In November 1935, Hammond had Lewis redo “Honky Tonk Train Blues”—his first solo recording since the 1927 original—for the Parlophone label, a British subsidiary of Columbia. On the heels of Cleo Brown’s success, Decca released Lewis’s record in the United States the following year. Like Brown’s “Boogie Woogie,” “Honky Tonk Train Blues” is a high-speed technical showpiece, but it’s not a typical boogie. The bass line is just a rudimentary chugging riff, which Lewis’s left hand maintains in a rigid tempo while his right hand plays a variety of figures in a contrasting rhythm.
In January 1936, Lewis made his next recording, “Yancey Special,” for Decca. It features the kind of habanera bass line often used by Jimmy Yancey, one of Lewis’s early models (Lewis had already recorded a Yancey-style bass line in 1930 as the accompanist on singer George Hannah’s “Freakish Man Blues”). But while Yancey would vary the bass pattern from one measure to the next, Lewis repeats the same riff over and over. It was 1939 before Yancey made records, which were appreciated mainly by cognoscenti. By contrast, Lewis’s “Yancey Special” was widely influential, especially in New Orleans, where its bass line became a rhythm-and-blues fixture, propelling such early rock ’n’ roll hits as Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill.”
The provenance of the “Yancey Special” bass line became a legal issue after the Chicago pianist Sonny Thompson used it in his band’s instrumental “Long Gone,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1948, and Lewis’s publisher sued Thompson’s record company for copyright infringement. Yancey testified that he and not Lewis had originated the bass line; Lewis contradicted himself, first denying and then admitting that he had named the tune after Yancey. Judge Michael L. Igoe did not conclude that Yancey was the composer but found for the defendant on a number of grounds, among them “that this bass is too simple to be copyrightable.”[43]
Albert Ammons had played with several bands before making his first record with his own sextet for Decca in January 1936, two days after Meade “Lux” Lewis’s “Yancey Special” session. On one side was “Nagasaki,” a Tin Pan Alley song by Harry Warren and Mort Dixon that had already been recorded by Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, the Mills Brothers, and Cab Calloway. On the other side was “Boogie Woogie Stomp,” Ammons’s version of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” on which he drops the recitation but stays close to the original piano part, playing it with considerably more flair and drive than Smith did. By William Russell’s account, “a few days before he died Pine Top called Albert Ammons aside and said, ‘Albert, I want you to learn my Boogie Woogie.’”[44]
Ammons was hardly the first to play boogie-woogie in a group setting. The Tampa Blue Jazz Band (a pseudonym for the Joseph Samuels Jazz Band, a white combo that accompanied the blues singer Mamie Smith in the late summer of 1921) had recorded George and Hersal Thomas’s “The Fives” for OKeh in February 1923, the same month Clay Custer cut “The Rocks.” The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, an influential white band, recorded Artie Matthews’s “Weary Blues,” complete with boogie bass line, the following month. In August 1923, Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra recorded “Dicty Blues,” an adaptation of “Chime Blues” featuring real chimes and a one-chorus boogie-woogie run played by the bass saxophonist Billy Fowler. Besides recording “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” in 1923 with his Blue Five, Clarence Williams was part of the accompanying quartet on Bessie Smith’s recording of the same song in 1930. King Oliver recorded a tune called “Boogie Woogie” with a big band in 1930, but it had no connection to the boogie-woogie other than the title.
Will Ezell cut “Pitchin’ Boogie” in 1929 with Blind Roosevelt Graves on guitar, his brother Uaroy (or Aaron) Graves on tambourine, and Baby Jay (or James) on cornet; at the same session, the same group cut “Guitar Boogie” (not the same as Arthur Smith’s country hit by the same title) and “Crazy about My Baby,” which were issued under Roosevelt Graves’s name. As the Mississippi Jook Band, the Graves brothers and pianist Cooney Vaughn recorded a number of boogie-driven tunes in July 1936, among them “Dangerous Woman” and “Barbecue Bust,” which the critic Robert Palmer described as featuring “fully formed rock & roll guitar riffs and a stomping rock & roll beat.”[45]
In early 1936, John Hammond, Benny Goodman, and Johnny Mercer went to a Chicago club where Meade “Lux” Lewis was playing with a trumpeter and drummer under the name Lux and His Chips. Goodman was so impressed that he arranged for Lewis to record “Honky Tonk Train Blues” again, for Victor. Hammond took Lewis to New York twice that year—first to perform in a star-studded show at the Imperial Theatre that was billed as the first swing concert and then to play an engagement at a Greenwich Village nightclub—but he was not well received.[46] Neither Ammons nor Lewis recorded between May 1936 and December 1938, but their reputation was growing, thanks largely to articles in Down Beat by Hammond and Sharon Pease, the magazine’s new piano columnist.
Hammond had heard Count Basie’s band on a radio broadcast around the end of 1935. Dazzled, he wrote about the band in Down Beat and traveled to Kansas City to sign Basie to a recording contract, only to discover that Dave Kapp of Decca Records had beat him to the punch. While the band was in Chicago in the autumn of 1936, on its way to its official studio debut in New York, Hammond arranged for Basie and several of his musicians, including the tenor saxophonist Lester Young and the blues singer Jimmy Rushing, to record a few numbers for Vocalion under the pseudonym Jones-Smith Incorporated.[47] Among them was “Boogie Woogie”—a combination of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” and Rushing’s “I May Be Wrong.” The arrangement transforms Pinetop’s theme into a Basie-esque call-and-response riff for saxophone and trumpet, omitting the boogie bass line almost entirely.
Rushing is considered to be the first blues “shouter,” a term that has come to be associated not only with vocal power but with the jazzy phrasing and intonation that Rushing brought to the blues. Born in Oklahoma City, he studied violin and piano, then traveled to California, where he sang with Jelly Roll Morton and other New Orleans jazz musicians. He preceded Count Basie in Walter Page’s Oklahoma City Blue Devils and followed Basie into Bennie Moten’s band, joining Basie’s own band along with Page after Moten’s death in 1935. Rushing’s swinging, sophisticated style was the model for the following generation of rhythm-and-blues singers as well as for urbane bluesmen such as B. B. King.
Basie recorded “Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong),” again featuring Rushing, for Decca with his big band in March 1937, playing an extended piano solo that contains only a single boogie chorus. In November 1938, accompanied by just a rhythm section, Basie recorded “Boogie Woogie” once more, without Rushing’s song, as part of a session that also included “The Dirty Dozens” and “The Fives.” This time he plays the boogie bass part intermittently in his own deft, economical style, using it as much for decoration as propulsion. His introduction features a repeating figure like the one played two years later by Jess Stacy in Bob Crosby’s “Cow Cow Blues” and by Sonny White in Benny Carter’s “Boogie Woogie Sugar Blues,” which may have inspired Freddie Slack’s piano riff in “Cow Cow Boogie.”
Benny Goodman’s big band recorded a version of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” titled “Roll ’Em,” in July 1937. Like Basie’s “Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong),” it turns Pinetop Smith’s tune into a swing vehicle, dispensing with the boogie bass line even on Jess Stacy’s piano solo. At Hammond’s behest, Goodman had solicited the chart from Mary Lou Williams, the pianist and arranger for Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy, a black band from Kansas City.[48] A boogie bass is conspicuous on Kirk’s February 1938 recording of “Little Joe from Chicago,” written by Williams and trombonist Henry Wells, but not on Williams’s September 1938 piano trio recordings of “The Rocks” and Freddie Shayne’s boogie-woogie standard “Mr. Freddie Blues.”
Bob Crosby’s big band recorded “Yancey Special” in March 1938 and “Honky Tonk Train Blues” that October. The arrangements are highly respectful—orchestrated transcriptions rather than creative adaptations—and Bob Zurke does an admirable job of duplicating Meade “Lux” Lewis’s original piano parts, bass lines and all, though he can’t equal Lewis’s rhythmic intensity.
Cab Calloway sang on his big band’s recording of “The Boogie-Woogie” in August 1938. As on the original “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” the lyrics consist mainly of instructions on how to do “the boogie woogie dance,” but there’s no walking bass to speak of and only a brief allusion to Pinetop’s melody. With its jive-talking introduction—“I’m gonna spiel to ya about a brand new dance that’s gonna slide to your conk and kill ya”—the song is a forerunner of the pop boogies of the 1940s.
Tommy Dorsey’s big band recorded “Boogie Woogie,” another variation on Pinetop’s anthem, in September 1938, featuring pianist Howard Smith. The arrangement, by saxophonist Deane Kincaide, is more-or-less faithful but so rhythmically staid as to be almost comically square by today’s standards. Nevertheless, it was a hit when it was first released and a bigger one after it was reissued in 1943, during a recording ban imposed by the musicians’ union. Reentering the pop charts in 1944 and 1945, it became the biggest-selling boogie-woogie instrumental of them all.
Woody Herman’s big band recorded “Indian Boogie Woogie” on December 22, 1938, featuring Tommy Linehan’s genuine if slightly wooden boogie piano. Blending mild exoticism with kitsch, it prefigures Will Bradley’s less corny 1940 novelty tune “Strange Cargo,” the inspiration for Henry Mancini’s “Theme from Peter Gunn.”
In 1936, John Hammond saw pianist Pete Johnson’s combo, featuring the blues shouter Big Joe Turner, at nightclub in Kansas City, Johnson’s and Turner’s home town. Johnson had absorbed Fats Waller’s stride piano style as well as Pinetop Smith’s boogie-woogie, while Turner had been influenced by classic blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, and Ethel Waters. Hammond persuaded them to come to New York that summer, where they played an engagement at the Famous Door on Fifty-second Street but were booed off the stage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. In the spring of 1938, they returned to New York, again at Hammond’s request, to perform on The Camel Caravan radio show with Benny Goodman.
In December 1938, Hammond invited Johnson and Turner back to New York to appear at Carnegie Hall along with Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis in the first “From Spirituals to Swing” concert. The program illustrated the development of African American music with performances by artists of Hammond’s choosing, among them the gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the bluesmen Sonny Terry and Big Bill Broonzy, and Count Basie, who led a quintet and sextet as well as his big band. It may have been the first presentation of country blues at Carnegie Hall, although W. C. Handy had staged a similarly themed concert there ten years earlier, featuring spirituals, minstrel songs, ragtime, jazz, and blues.
Sponsored by the Marxist magazine New Masses, Hammond’s December 23 show drew a packed house (the second “From Spirituals to Swing” concert was held on Christmas Eve the following year). Ammons and Lewis each played a solo piece, Johnson accompanied Turner on two songs and Big Bill Broonzy on one, and all three pianists played together on two numbers, backed on one by Walter Page and Jo Jones, Basie’s bassist and drummer. (Recordings of the concert were made but not released until 1959.)
This time the boogie-woogie pianists were a sensation, igniting a boogie craze that would last for a decade. The day after the concert, Alan Lomax recorded Ammons, Lewis, and Johnson for the Library of Congress. On December 30, the three pianists cut the two-sided “Boogie Woogie Prayer” for Vocalion; Lewis recorded “Bear Cat Crawl” on the same date, and Ammons recorded the flip side, “Shout for Joy,” two days later. The December 30 session also yielded Turner and Johnson’s first record, “Roll ’Em Pete,” backed with “Goin’ Away Blues.”
“Roll ’Em Pete” was Johnson’s signature tune at Kansas City clubs such as the Sunset Crystal Palace. “On a good night, I would play chorus after chorus, always keeping adding to them . . . sometimes for an hour or longer,” he recounted.[49] Mary Lou Williams appropriated the title for the Benny Goodman arrangement she wrote. “Ben Webster would yell, ‘Roll for me, roll ’em, Pete, make ’em jump,’” she recalled, “and then Pete would play boogie for us.”[50] Johnson performed the song with Turner at Carnegie Hall under the title “It’s All Right Baby” (with verses somewhat different than on their Vocalion disc) and recorded it the next day for Alan Lomax as an instrumental called “Roll ’Em.” But the December 30 Vocalion recording, usually credited to Turner rather than Johnson, is considered definitive.
Predating “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by nearly ten years, “Roll ’Em Pete” may well be regarded as the first rock ’n’ roll record. Although earlier songs contain elements of rock ’n’ roll, “Roll ’Em Pete” is a full-fledged rocker in all but instrumentation—similar in melody and structure to Turner’s 1950s hits “Honey Hush” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” but faster and more intense. Johnson’s bass line is a simple Chuck Berry–like chug, and his furious right-hand embellishments anticipate Berry’s entire guitar style. Some of Turner’s verses are the stuff that rock is made of, such as the opening “I’ve got a gal, lives up on the hill. / Well, this woman tried to quit me, Lord, but I love her still.” But others—such as “You so beautiful, but you gotta die some day. / All I want [is a] little lovin’, babe, just before you pass away”—are too mature for teenage listeners. If anything, Turner’s brilliant phrasing and Johnson’s breathtaking keyboard technique are too sophisticated for rock ’n’ roll: the music has yet to be formularized for mass consumption.
On January 6, 1939, Lewis and Ammons became the first artists to record for Blue Note, a record label founded by Alfred Lion, a jazz-loving refugee from Nazi Germany who had attended the Carnegie Hall concert. Johnson would likewise record for Blue Note in 1939, and all three pianists also recorded that year for Solo Art, another new label that catered to jazz purists.
Ammons and Lewis played “Roll ’Em” with Benny Goodman’s band on The Camel Caravan on January 3 and April 11 of 1939; Johnson did the same on January 31. On February 1, at John Hammond’s suggestion, Ammons and Johnson each recorded a couple of sides with trumpeter Harry James, who had just left Goodman’s band.[51] Later that year, all three pianists were billed with James’s own big band, featuring the yet-unknown Frank Sinatra, at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago.
The “From Spirituals to Swing” concert had coincided with the opening of Cafe Society, a Greenwich Village nightclub run by a politically engagé former shoe-store owner, Barney Josephson, whose financial backers included Hammond and Goodman. Ammons, Lewis, Johnson, and Turner were regulars at Cafe Society from its inception, using it as a home base between tours. Turner and Lewis departed in 1941, but Ammons and Johnson stayed on for several more years, appearing at the club’s upscale Midtown Manhattan branch as well as its original location. Josephson’s novel policy of racial integration, not to mention such performers as Billie Holiday and Lena Horne, attracted left-wing luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson, lending boogie-woogie an air of radical chic. Regular radio broadcasts from the club helped cement its reputation as the boogie-woogie mecca.
At this point, boogie-woogie was viewed both as folk art and commercial entertainment. Although they also performed and recorded ballads and slow blues, Ammons, Lewis, and Johnson were best known for fast boogies that showcased their pianistic prowess. They often played with one another in duos or as a trio, furthering the transformation of boogie-woogie from dance music into bravura display. But in 1939, Solo Art recorded Jimmy Yancey and Cripple Clarence Lofton, older boogie pianists who were more idiosyncratic and less virtuosic. Yancey went on to release some dozen sides for Victor, Vocalion, and Bluebird over the next year and a half, ironically surpassing the individual major-label output of Ammons, Lewis, or Johnson during the same period. Turner meanwhile recorded prolifically for various commercial labels (but not for Blue Note or Solo Art), accompanied by such pianists as Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Art Tatum, Sammy Price, and Freddie Slack, as well as by Benny Carter’s band.
The earliest boogie-woogie albums mixed swing-band and piano boogies indiscriminately. Decca’s Boogie Woogie Music, from 1940, features two new recordings by Johnson along with reissues going back to 1935, among them Ammons’s “Boogie Woogie Stomp,” Lewis’s “Yancey Special,” Cleo Brown’s “Boogie Woogie,” Mary Lou Williams’s “Overhand,” and band arrangements by Bob Crosby, Woody Herman, Teddy Powell, and Andy Kirk. Only two numbers besides Johnson’s were recorded after the “From Spirituals to Swing” concert. Columbia’s Boogie Woogie, from 1941, includes most of the Ammons, Lewis, Johnson, and Turner Vocalion recordings from December 1938 together with Basie’s 1936 “Boogie Woogie” and one each of Ammons’s and Johnson’s 1939 sides with Harry James.
Few boogie recordings from before 1935 were reissued until much later. Several of the earlier boogie-woogie pianists—Yancey, Cow Cow Davenport, Montana Taylor, Freddie Shayne—were rediscovered and recorded in the 1940s, but their music appealed mainly to aficionados. The public’s attention turned instead to a new, racially mixed generation of boogie players, mostly big-band pianists such as Ken Kersey, Bob Zurke, and Freddie Slack.
Big-band boogies proliferated after the Carnegie Hall show. Oddly enough, one of the earlier ones was by James P. Johnson, known as the father of stride piano, who recorded “Harlem Woogie” in March 1939 with a swing combo featuring singer Anna Robinson. Like Cab Calloway’s “The Boogie-Woogie,” it’s a conventional pop song rather than a real boogie, announcing the arrival of a new dance over bouncing stride rhythms. The Basie-like “Teddy’s Boogie Woogie,” recorded in October 1939 by the briefly successful white bandleader Teddy Powell, is truer to the boogie form, with a brawny tenor saxophone solo by Pete Mondello that anticipates the “honking” style of postwar R&B. Harry James’s bluesy “Back Beat Boogie,” from November 1939, is another rock precursor: behind Jack Gardner’s boogie piano, drummer Mickey Scrima sharply accents the second and fourth beats of each measure, a departure from the typically even 4/4 swing rhythm.
In February 1940, Earl Hines and his big band recorded “Boogie Woogie on the St. Louis Blues,” a takeoff on W. C. Handy’s classic that proved to be a substantial hit. Like Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson, Hines was a jazz-piano pioneer, having played on Louis Armstrong’s historic Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions before forming his own band in 1928. Although “Boogie Woogie on the St. Louis Blues” doesn’t use walking bass lines throughout, Hines does play an authentic boogie solo in his own distinctive style. But not every jazz pianist jumped on the boogie bandwagon. Fats Waller, a protégé of James P. Johnson, so disliked the boogie-woogie that he stipulated in his performance contracts that he not be required to play it.[52]
In March 1940, Cab Calloway recorded “Boog It,” a jiving update on “The Boogie-Woogie” with no connection to the boogie beyond the title phrase. The song was a pop hit for Glenn Miller, then at the peak of his fame, and for Gene Krupa, though not for Calloway; it was also covered by Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, and Louis Armstrong with the Mills Brothers.
“Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar),” later dismissed by the distinguished jazz historian Gunther Schuller as an “inane novelty tune,” was the highest-charting boogie-woogie hit, a bestseller for Will Bradley, the Andrews Sisters, and Glenn Miller.[53] Bradley’s version, produced for Columbia by John Hammond in May 1940, opens with Freddie Slack playing boogie piano with a bass line of his own invention, but the walking bass is heard only on Slack’s solos.[54] The Andrews Sisters’ snappy version, recorded in August 1940, is musically boogie-less except for a short piano solo featuring a Pinetop-style bass line. Glenn Miller’s imaginative arrangement, recorded in September, contains occasional boogie patterns, mostly played on upright bass, and a couple of clever thematic references to “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie.”
“Scrub Me, Mama, with a Boogie Beat,” its melody borrowed from the familiar jig “The Irish Washerwoman,” was nearly as big a hit for Bradley as “Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar),” and his September 1940 recording makes greater use of boogie rhythms—not only Slack’s original piano bass line but bassist Doc Goldberg’s more typical “Weary Blues” pattern, which gives the band’s riffing ensemble passages a Bill Haley–style rock feel. The Andrews Sisters’ “Scrub Me, Mama, with a Boogie Beat,” a lesser hit, features a walking bass variation that could easily fit a rock ’n’ roll song.
Walter Lantz’s 1941 cartoon “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,” part of his Swing Symphony series, displays the degree to which racism was still acceptable in mainstream American entertainment. While the song itself—depicting blacks as menials with a natural sense of rhythm—is offensive by today’s standards, it’s innocuous compared to the cartoon, which transplants the song’s setting from Harlem to “Lazy Town,” a ramshackle southern hamlet whose dark-skinned, blubber-lipped residents move in slow motion, when they’re not sleeping, until a light-complexioned, fine-featured Lena Horne look-alike struts off a riverboat and galvanizes them into rhythmic action.
Three more boogie-themed songs made the pop charts in 1941: the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” about a jazz trumpeter swept up in America’s first peacetime draft; Glenn Miller’s “The Booglie Wooglie Piggy,” based on the children’s rhyme “This Little Piggy Went to Market”; and Gene Krupa’s “Drum Boogie,” whose title is a pun on the 1940 hit “Rhumboogie,” which Krupa also recorded. Krupa’s band is featured playing “Drum Boogie” in the Howard Hawks–directed screwball-comedy movie Ball of Fire, with Barbara Stanwyck, as the nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea, performing the vocal part originally recorded by Irene Daye. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who was one of the first black musicians to become a full-time member of a white band and who cowrote “Drum Boogie” with Krupa, is seen playing a brief solo. Gary Cooper, in the role of a stuffy English professor researching an encyclopedia article on slang, hears the song and asks a waiter, “What does ‘boogie’ mean?” prompting the reply, “Are you kiddin’?”
The studio dates of the next two Top 10 boogie-woogie hits, Freddie Slack’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s respective versions of “Cow-Cow Boogie,” straddle the recording ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians in August 1942. The head of that union, James C. Petrillo, demanded that record companies compensate musicians for income supposedly lost when live music was replaced by recordings played on radio programs and jukeboxes. Fitzgerald’s label, Decca, was the first of the majors to give in, two months before her “Cow-Cow Boogie” session in November 1943; RCA and Columbia held out until November 1944.
Because this first recording ban (Petrillo called a second one in 1948) coincided with a crucial phase in the gestation of the bebop movement, jazz historians have viewed it as a musical watershed dividing the swing and bebop eras. One might also regard the ban as marking off swing from rhythm-and-blues, but the transition between those two genres was so gradual that any temporal boundary is purely arbitrary. The stylistic difference between Slack’s and Fitzgerald’s “Cow-Cow Boogie” is minimal, but the two recordings do illustrate a significant shift: before the ban, the musicians who recorded pop boogies were mostly white; afterward—country artists excepted—they were mostly black.
Of course, black bandleaders recorded boogie tunes before 1942: besides Count Basie, Andy Kirk, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, James P. Johnson, and Earl Hines, there was Franz Jackson (“Boogie Woogie Camp Meeting”), Louis Jordan (“Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie”), Buddy Johnson (“Boogie Woogie’s Mother-in-Law”), Red Allen (“K.K. Boogie”), and Jay McShann (“Vine Street Boogie”), among others. And white artists continued to record boogies after 1944: Freddie Slack, for example, had his biggest hit with “House of Blue Lights” in 1946.
After World War II, however, the boogie-woogie found more favor with white “sweet” bands—the decorous progenitors of what would come to be known as easy-listening music—than with white swing bands. In 1946, a year after the flashy pianist Carmen Cavallaro scored a Top 10 hit with a pop-styled “Chopin’s Polonaise,” his rival Frankie Carle recorded “Chopin’s Polonaise in Boogie.” Also in 1946, bandleader Freddy Martin had a Top 10 pop hit with “Bumble Boogie,” an adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” featuring pianist Jack Fina. In 1947, Cavallaro cut “Anitra’s Boogie,” based on “Anitra’s Dance” by Grieg. And in 1948, Martin scored one of the last big pop-boogie hits with “Sabre Dance Boogie,” based on Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.” Such classical adaptations date back at least to 1941, when bandleader Larry Clinton recorded “Bach to Boogie.”
If a single breakthrough hit can be said to have established the boogie-woogie as a staple of postwar rhythm-and-blues, it is “Hamp’s Boogie Woogie,” recorded by Lionel Hampton’s big band in March 1944. Unlike most pop boogies of the time, it’s essentially a keyboard piece, and it uses different bass lines in a manner similar to “The Rocks” or “The Fives,” but more propulsively. Pianist Milt Buckner opens with octave chords in his innovative “locked-hands” style before switching to a more orthodox, Albert Ammons–like pattern (Hampton recorded “Hamp’s Boogie Woogie No. 2” in 1949, with Ammons himself replacing Buckner). Then Buckner shifts to a “Yancey Special” bass while Hampton plays a percussive piano solo with his index fingers, mimicking his mallet technique on vibraphone, his main instrument. Only near the end does the full band come in for the wailing climax.
“Hamp’s Boogie Woogie” was a No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Harlem Hit Parade (a predecessor to the magazine’s Rhythm & Blues chart) and also crossed over to the pop charts. Hampton was well known to white fans, having played alongside Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson in Benny Goodman’s quartet, one of the first integrated jazz groups. He’d also recorded pop hits under his own name, notably “After You’ve Gone,” from 1937. But in his autobiography, referring to his music in the mid-1940s, he writes, “I stayed in the black groove. You’d know my band was black just from listening to it. The crossover to the white audience hadn’t happened yet.”[55]
Louis Jordan managed to cross over to the white audience at the same time that he dominated the rhythm-and-blues charts. A showman in the mold of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and especially Cab Calloway, he was, like Hampton, an entertainer as much as a musician. Before forming his own combo in 1938, he spent two years playing saxophone and sometimes singing with Chick Webb’s highly regarded swing band, which featured Ella Fitzgerald. “I loved playing jazz with a big band. Loved singing the blues,” he reflected. “But . . . I wanted to play for the people, for millions, not just a few hep cats.”[56]
Having acquired a pair of kettledrums, Jordan dubbed his band the Tympany Five, keeping the misspelled name even as the group expanded to six or seven members. From the beginning, he took a commercial approach, applying swing rhythms to comedy songs, Tin Pan Alley standards, country blues, even nursery rhymes, often using jive lyrics and stereotypically African American themes. At one point, he billed himself as “the modern Bert Williams.”[57]
Jordan had recorded such numbers as “Saxa-Woogie” and “Boogie Woogie Came to Town” before cutting “G.I. Jive” in March 1944. That song, likening army jargon to hepster lingo, had already been recorded by its composer, Johnny Mercer, but it was a much bigger hit for Jordan, reaching the top spot on both the pop and rhythm-and-blues charts. Unlike Mercer’s version, Jordan’s is driven by a boogie-woogie bass line and a shuffling drumbeat that in parts give it an uncanny rock ’n’ roll feel.
In January 1945, Jordan cut “Caldonia,” circumventing his publishing contract by registering the song under his wife’s maiden name, Fleecie Moore, so that he could film it as a Soundie.[58] By the time Decca released Jordan’s record, cover versions of “Caldonia” by the white bandleader Woody Herman (sung by Herman himself) and the black bandleader Erskine Hawkins (sung by pianist Ace Harris) had already been issued, and both were big hits. But Jordan’s rendition, with a more emphatic boogie bass and shuffle beat than “G.I. Jive,” eclipsed all others. The screeching refrain—“Caldonia! Caldonia! What makes your big head so hard?”—is taken from “Old Man Ben,” a Louis Armstrong–style comic blues recorded in 1938 by the trumpeter and singer Hot Lips Page. The Spirits of Rhythm had already used the phrase in their 1941 recording of “We’ve Got the Blues,” but it became Jordan’s trademark line.
Jordan used boogie bass patterns on such 1945 R&B hits as “Salt Pork, West Virginia” and “Reconversion Blues,” but “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” recorded in January 1946, also features a genuine boogie-woogie piano solo by Wild Bill Davis. That song became Jordan’s biggest-selling single, although as a contemporary reviewer noted, the main theme was lifted directly from the piano part on “Hamp’s Boogie Woogie.”[59] The same session yielded another No. 1 R&B hit, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman,” which likewise shuffles to a boogie beat and features a boogie piano solo by Davis, as well as the Carl Hogan guitar introduction that inspired “Johnny B. Goode.” Chuck Berry made no bones about his stylistic debt to Jordan, saying, “I identify myself with Louis Jordan more than any other artist.”[60]
During the next couple of years, boogie bass lines turned up on such Jordan hits as “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,” “Reet, Petite and Gone,” “Boogie Woogie Blue Plate,” and “Barnyard Boogie.” By this time the boogie-woogie had become a rhythm-and-blues fixture, a hit-making template for veterans and newcomers alike. Count Basie enjoyed success with “The Mad Boogie” in 1946 and “One O’Clock Boogie” in 1947, although they were boogies in little more than name. Albert Ammons made the R&B Top 10 in 1947 with his sprightly “Swanee River Boogie,” which was resurrected as a pop hit in 1953 by a white big band, the Commanders.
For the rhythm-and-blues artists of the postwar era, boogie-woogie records were a little like calling cards. There was “Cecil Boogie” (Cecil Gant), “T-Bone Boogie” (T-Bone Walker), “Milton’s Boogie” (Roy Milton), “Amos’ Boogie” (Amos Milburn), “Wynonie’s Boogie” (Wynonie Harris), “Camille’s Boogie” (Camille Howard), “Tiny’s Boogie Woogie” (Tiny Grimes), “Hazel’s Boogie Woogie” (Hazel Scott), “Slim Gaillard’s Boogie,” “Roy Brown’s Boogie,” “Hadda’s Boogie” (Hadda Brooks), “Little Joe’s Boogie” (Joe Liggins), and “Bradshaw Boogie” (Tiny Bradshaw), just to name a few. Naturally, these represent only a small fraction of the R&B boogies of the period, many of which do not use the word “boogie” in the title. Conversely, some titular boogies—the Los Angeles blues shouter Duke Henderson’s “18th and Vine Street Boogie,” for example—are scarcely boogies at all.
White bandleaders were not alone when it came to boogying the classics. Pianist Hadda Brooks, billed as the Queen of the Boogie, recorded “Humoresque Boogie” and “Grieg’s Concerto Boogie in A Minor.” Camille Howard, the pianist in Roy Milton’s band, cut “Song of India Boogie” and “Schubert’s Serenade Boogie.” But most R&B boogies of the late 1940s and early 1950s were bluesy, up-tempo numbers, the kind that became associated with the word “rock.” Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight” has a boogie bass line, as does Wild Bill Moore’s “We’re Gonna Rock,” which also contains an extended piano boogie section. The boogie bass grew more pronounced on songs that followed Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” such as Jimmy Preston’s “Rock the Joint,” Joe Lutcher’s “Rockola,” and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88.” A few songs even combined the words “rock” and “boogie” in the same title, such as Lutcher’s “Rockin’ Boogie,” Cecil Gant’s “Rock the Boogie,” and Jimmie Gordon’s “Rock That Boogie.”
Though hardly a typical boogie-woogie pianist, Alphonso “Sonny” Thompson was one of the most influential, if only because his hit “Long Gone” had a singular impact on the rhythm-and-blues scene. Born in Centerville, Mississippi, or Memphis, Tennessee, depending on which source can be believed, he moved to Chicago as a youth, studying music at a conservatory while listening to Earl Hines and Art Tatum.[61] He played in the band of violinist Erskine Tate, then formed his own group; he also worked as a solo pianist and filled in with the bands of Lonnie Simmons, Red Allen, and Stuff Smith. In 1945, following a wartime army stint, he was hired to replace Earl Hines at a prestigious South Side club, leading a big band. During the same period, he made his recorded debut with a sextet that backed singer June Richmond on Mercury.
In the spring of 1946, Thompson cut his first two sides as a leader for the small, Detroit-based Sultan label, which issued them on two different records with two different artists on the flip sides. “South Side Boogie” and “Sonny’s Boogie” are both flashy pop boogies for solo piano, with “Sonny’s Boogie” interpolating a few bars of “Anitra’s Dance.” In September 1946, Thompson began recording for the new Chicago label Miracle as a member of the tenor saxophonist Dick Davis’s band, initially backing the torch singer Rudy Richardson. Thompson plays furiously proto-rocking boogie-woogie piano between bluesy saxophone solos on Davis’s own “Screamin’ Boogie,” from early 1947, and sings the lead on “Sonny’s Blues,” from the same session. Later that year, he played—often together with an instrumental trio called the Sharps and Flats—on Miracle recordings by the blues shouter Piney Brown, the jazz singer Gladys Palmer, and the rhythm-and-blues crooner Browley Guy.[62]
Thompson recorded “Long Gone (Part I)” with the Sharps and Flats in November 1947, cutting “Long Gone (Part II)” later the same month with Eddie Chamblee added on tenor saxophone. Both sides of “Long Gone” ride a “Yancey Special” bass line played by guitarist Arvin Garrett, who also solos alternately with Thompson on “Part I”; Chamblee plays the lead throughout “Part II,” with Thompson adding embellishments. One of the biggest rhythm-and-blues hits of 1948, “Long Gone” has a relaxed, bluesy groove and a melody that prefigures “The Huckle-Buck.” Its bass line began showing up on other R&B records shortly afterward, with the octave-jumping second note sometimes omitted.
Thompson followed “Long Gone” with “Late Freight,” again featuring Eddie Chamblee, and it, too, became a No. 1 R&B hit. Recorded in December 1947, before “Long Gone” was released, “Late Freight” has a chugging bass line played on piano, with Garrett’s “Yancey Special” riff heard only momentarily. Thompson cut his next hit, the mellow “Blue Dreams,” the same month; not until the spring of 1949 did he repeat the “Long Gone” formula on the two-part hit “Still Gone.” He switched to King Records in January 1950, and though a United States District Court in Illinois found for Miracle shortly afterward in the “Yancey Special” copyright case, that label soon folded. But Thompson did not have another hit until 1952, after he recorded the two-part instrumental “Mellow Blues,” largely a tenor saxophone vehicle for Robert Hadley with a “Yancey Special” bass line. Thompson had two more hits in 1952, both written by Henry Glover and both featuring the high-pitched singer Lula Reed, whom Thompson later married. One of them was “I’ll Drown in My Tears,” which Ray Charles covered as “Drown in My Own Tears” for a No. 1 R&B hit in 1956; the song, its melody based on Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long Blues,” has since been sung by everyone from Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin to Johnny Winter and Janis Joplin.
Although he recorded regularly for King into the mid-1950s, Thompson had no further hits. He also recorded in accompaniment to other King artists, including Wynonie Harris, Lucky Millinder, the Swallows, the Charms, the Royals (who became the Midnighters), and Lula Reed. He began recording for the former King producer Henry Stone’s Miami-based Chart label in 1955 but returned to King in 1956. He toured nationally together with Lula Reed through the 1950s but then stopped performing, recording only infrequently. In 1959, he replaced Ralph Bass as King’s A&R director in Chicago, where he produced hits for the bluesman Freddie King.[63] Thompson continued to do session work after King Records closed its Chicago office in 1964 and cut a pair of his own albums in France for the Black & Blue label in 1972. He died in 1989.
Jo Stafford’s “Kissin’ Bug Boogie,” sporting a prominent boogie bass line, was a pop hit in 1951, and the white ragtime pianist Johnny Maddox charted with “Eight Beat Boogie” in 1953, but by the middle of the decade the boogie-woogie had practically vanished from the popular mainstream, just as boogie-based rock ’n’ roll came in. An artifact of the transition is “Little Richard’s Boogie,” recorded with Johnny Otis’s band for the Peacock label in 1953. Less frantic than Richard’s classic Specialty hits, “Little Richard’s Boogie” is nevertheless a manifest harbinger of things soon to come. Citing an unspecified 1990 interview, the website of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum quotes Little Richard as declaring, “I would say that boogie-woogie and rhythm & blues mixed is rock and roll.”[64]
Bill Haley recorded the mildly boogie-ish “Birth of the Boogie” in early 1955 and, on the heels of “Rock Around the Clock,” scored a minor hit in late 1955 with “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie,” a song he’d written two years earlier. Big Joe Turner cut “Boogie Woogie Country Girl,” featuring Vann “Piano Man” Walls, in November 1955; released as the flip side of the hit “Corrine Corrina,” it inspired several rockabilly covers. Huey “Piano” Smith had a hit in 1957 with “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” which was later covered by Johnny Rivers and by Dave Edmunds, among others; although it’s not really a boogie, Smith’s original features a habanera-like bass line and a recurring piano riff borrowed from “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie.”
The boogie lingered through the 1950s in rockabilly music, itself an outgrowth of the postwar hillbilly-boogie movement that peaked with the crossover success of Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” in 1950 and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “The Shot Gun Boogie” in 1951. Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones’ “Boppin’ Rock Boogie” and Johnny Burnette’s “Rock Billy Boogie,” both from 1957, are boogies in name only. But Bobby Poe and the Poe Kats’ feverish “Rock & Roll Boogie,” from 1958, is the real thing, featuring a strong boogie bass throughout, plus the piano work of Big Al Dowling, one of the few black musicians on the country music scene of that era. And Boyd Bennett’s “Boogie Bear,” an authentically boogie-based number built around the Yogi Bear cartoon character from television’s The Huckleberry Hound Show, was a minor pop hit in 1959.
The boogie-woogie made a last splash on the pop charts at the hands of B. Bumble and the Stingers, an offshoot of Ernie Fields’s band of Los Angeles studio musicians that producer Kim Fowley enlisted to update Freddy Martin’s 1946 pop hit “Bumble Boogie.” On the Stingers’ “Bumble Boogie,” a 1961 pop hit, Ernie Freeman plays Rachmaninoff’s theme on a what sounds like a toy piano—actually a piano with thumbtacks stuck in the hammers—over a surf-music rhythm rather than a boogie beat. The group’s follow-up single, “Boogie Woogie,” a rinky-dink version of the Pinetop Smith classic with a heavy boogie bass, barely cracked the Top 100. (Pianist Al Hazan replaced Freeman on the Stingers’ final hit, “Nut Rocker,” a tacky take on the “March” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite that became a No. 1 smash in England in 1962. Although it lacks a boogie bass line, “Nut Rocker” seems to be based largely on the introduction to pianist Moon Mullican’s 1951 country hit “Cherokee Boogie.”)
The word “boogie” disappeared from pop music for most of the 1960s but made a comeback in 1968 with the release of the album Boogie with Canned Heat. The “boogies” of Canned Heat, a white rock group with a strong interest in older blues, were not based on the boogie-woogie, however, but on a guitar rhythm introduced on John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen,” a No. 1 R&B hit in 1949. Bernard Besman, who produced “Boogie Chillen” in Detroit for the Modern label, says he suggested that Hooker record a boogie-woogie. “I go up to the piano and play a few bars of a boogie,” Besman recounted. “Todd Rhodes was still there, and he was a pianist, so I said, ‘Todd, why don’t you play some boogie for him and see what happens?’ So he played, and I said to John, ‘Do you think you can do that, some of that?’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, sure.’ That’s why the word ‘boogie’ is in there. Nothing to do with the song, you know. ‘Boogie Chillen’’s not a boogie. That was just what he thought was a boogie, and so I called it ‘Boogie Chillen.’”[65]
Hooker denied Besman’s story but did take credit for creating a new kind of boogie, inspiring such knockoffs as Little Junior Parker’s 1953 R&B hit “Feelin’ Good.” “A long time ago, they used to call it boogie-woogie, on an old piano,” Hooker said. “But as the years went by, as the time went by into the modern day, they called it the boogie. It ain’t the boogie-woogie anymore, it was the boogie. And I think I started all of that.”[66]
By the mid-1970s, the word “boogie” had become a verb meaning “to dance” or simply “to move,” as in Eddie Kendricks’s song “Boogie Down” or Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie On Reggae Woman.” After a few more hits—the Sylvers’ “Boogie Fever,” A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes,” Claudja Barry’s “Boogie Woogie Dancin’ Shoes”—the boogie made a nominal departure from the pop charts, although boogie-woogie bass lines still turn up occasionally on retro-rock tunes and advertising jingles.
Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Pete Johnson continued to perform and record through World War II, making radio broadcasts and appearing in films. Ammons and Johnson worked together as a duo, although they usually recorded separately, while Lewis went out on his own, moving to Los Angeles. After the war, Ammons returned to Chicago, where he recorded for the Mercury label and sometimes performed with Jimmy Yancey. In 1945, he made four records with Sippie Wallace; in 1947, he appeared with Pete Johnson at the Streets of Paris club in Hollywood. He played for the inauguration of President Harry Truman in January 1949 and cut seven sides with Lionel Hampton’s band the following week. But in December 1949 he died, at the age of forty-two; Jimmy Yancey died two years later, at fifty-three.
Meade “Lux” Lewis performed in Hollywood clubs and appeared in the movies It’s a Wonderful Life (with James Stewart) in 1946 and New Orleans (with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday) in 1947 but did not have the same postwar recording success as Ammons. In 1952, he toured with Pete Johnson, Art Tatum, and Erroll Garner and played a few dates with Johnson alone; in 1956, he appeared in the film noir Nightmare (with Edward G. Robinson). As the popularity of the boogie waned, he made a series of long-playing albums, whose titles—Boogie Woogie Interpretations (Atlantic, 1952), Yancey’s Last Ride (Clef, 1954), Cat House Piano (Verve, 1955), Barrel House Piano (Tops, 1956), and Out of the Roaring Twenties (ABC-Paramount, 1956)—trace his turn toward Tin Pan Alley and Dixieland material. He cut two more albums in the early 1960s and made television appearances on the Roaring 20’s series and The Steve Allen Show. But after a performance in suburban Minneapolis in June 1964, a speeding driver struck his car, killing Lewis instantly.
Pete Johnson’s career suffered the most precipitous decline. After Ammons’s death, Johnson moved to Buffalo, New York, where he worked at various day jobs while performing mostly in local clubs. In 1958, he and Big Joe Turner toured Europe with the Jazz at the Philharmonic package show and played the Newport Jazz Festival, but soon afterward, Johnson was incapacitated by a series of strokes. In January 1967, two months before he died, Johnson made a final appearance, playing piano with only his right hand while Turner sang “Roll ’Em Pete” at a latter-day “From Spirituals to Swing” concert produced by John Hammond at Carnegie Hall.
Of the four artists who presented the boogie-woogie at the original “From Spirituals to Swing” concert, only Big Joe Turner achieved long-term success. He had a rhythm-and-blues hit in 1945 with a cover of Saunders King’s “S.K. Blues,” accompanied by Pete Johnson’s band, and another hit in 1946 with “My Gal’s a Jockey,” accompanied by Wild Bill Moore’s combo. The latter song, a mid-tempo rocker a with prominent boogie bass line, marks the approximate stylistic halfway point between “Roll ’Em Pete” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
In the late 1940s, Turner recorded for such labels as National, Imperial, Aladdin, Modern, and MGM, with bands featuring pianists such as Pete Johnson, Bill Doggett, and Fats Domino. He did a cover version of Wynonie Harris’s “Around the Clock” that rocked harder than the original and sang a duet with Harris himself on “Battle of the Blues.” But Turner did not make the R&B charts again until the 1950s, when he cut a string of hits on the Atlantic label, among them the pop crossovers “Chains of Love,” “Honey Hush,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and “Corrine Corrina.” His output declined in the 1960s, although he did record albums with Bill Haley in Mexico and with the Zagreb Jazz Quartet in Yugoslavia. By the 1970s, he was back in demand, as an old-time jazz and blues singer, and he remained active until his death in 1985, touring Europe and cutting albums for Pablo and other labels, including a couple with Count Basie. The sole swing-era survivor to become a recognized rock ’n’ roll star, he was an outsize figure in more ways than one.
Besides Lewis and Johnson, few of the pianists associated with the boogie-woogie continued to perform after the 1950s. Little Brother Montgomery and Roosevelt Sykes kept working until their deaths in the 1980s, but both were considered bluesmen rather than boogie specialists. Jay McShann recorded through 2003, three years before his death, but he was regarded mainly as a jazz musician. Almost all of today’s boogie pianists are white revivalists such as Erwin Helfer, from Chicago, and Axel Zwingenberger, from Germany. And while boogie bass lines are inescapably familiar to rock fans, the boogie-woogie per se has little more than nostalgic appeal outside collectors’ circles.
A fascinating sidelight to the boogie-woogie phenomenon is the influence of the boogie in Jamaica. The island’s upper crust embraced American swing music in the 1940s, and local big bands copied arrangements by the likes of Count Basie and Glenn Miller. Imported rhythm-and-blues swept the country after World War II; one of the biggest-selling records was Wynonie Harris’s “Bloodshot Eyes,” a 1951 cover of Hank Penny’s 1950 country hit. The postwar R&B sound, with its boogie bass lines and shuffle drumbeats, gave way to rock ’n’ roll in the United States but hung on in Jamaica, where bands made up mostly of jazz musicians fashioned their own “Jamaican boogie.”
Produced by Chris Blackwell, Laurel Aitken’s “Boogie in My Bones,” with a shuffling boogie beat taken from Rosco Gordon’s 1952 R&B hits “Booted” and “No More Doggin’,” was a seminal Jamaican smash in 1959. Sometimes cited as the first ska record, Theophilus Beckford’s “Easy Snappin’,” produced by Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and released in 1959, has essentially the same rhythm, but Beckford plays an afterbeat on piano that gives the song a distinctive Jamaican cast. Another disc that’s been identified as the first ska record, the Folkes Brothers’ “Oh Carolina,” produced by Prince Buster during the same period, features Afro-Jamaican drumming over a habanera bass line. The ska rhythm, with the afterbeat usually played on guitar, dominated Jamaican pop music through the mid-1960s before giving way to rocksteady and then reggae. It can thus be said that the boogie-woogie lies at the foundation of both rock ’n’ roll and reggae, two of the most popular and influential musical genres of the twentieth century and beyond.
1. Max Harrison, “Boogie-Woogie,” in Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz by Twelve of the World’s Foremost Jazz Critics and Scholars, ed. Nat Hentoff and Albert McCarthy, 2nd pbk. printing (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 [orig. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959]), 134.
2. Chuck Berry, The Autobiography (New York: Harmony Books, 1987), 142.
3. William Russell, “Boogie Woogie,” Jazzmen, ed. Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith (New York: Limelight Editions, 1967 [orig. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939]), 183–205.
4. Ernest Borneman, “Boogie Woogie,” Just Jazz, ed. Sinclair Traill and Gerald Lascelles (London: Peter Davies, 1957), 13–40.
5. Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (New York: Oak Publications, 1966 [orig. Alfred A. Knopf, 1950]), 192. If Eubie Blake was actually born in 1887, as Peter Hanley maintains, he would have been only nine years old, not thirteen, when he heard William Turk play boogie-woogie; alternatively, Blake may have heard Turk in 1900, not 1896. (See note 46, chapter 2.)
6. H. B. Kay, “8 to the Bar,” The Record Changer, May 1949, 14, 20. Kay refers to Koster and Bial’s Music Hall as “the Koster & Beals Music Hall.”
7. Onah L. Spencer, “Boogie Piano Was Hot Stuff in 1904!” Down Beat, July 1939, 22.
8. Jelly Roll Morton, “Michigan Water Blues” disc 6, track 18, The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). The quotation is transcribed on p. 110 of the PDF file on disc 8; Jelly Roll Morton, “Jelly Roll Says He Was First to Play Jazz,” Down Beat, September 1938, 4.
9. Ross Russell, “Illuminating the Leadbelly Legend,” Down Beat, August 6, 1970, 12; Charles E. Smith, “Leadbelly—King of the 12-String Guitar,” The Leadbelly Songbook, ed. Moses Asch and Alan Lomax (New York: Oak Publications, 1962), 14; Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 35. Wolfe and Lornell quote Leadbelly, without attribution, as saying, “It was about 1904, 1903, piano players were walking the bases [sic].” Other sources claim that Leadbelly heard pianists play boogie-woogie bass lines as early as 1899.
10. Borneman, “Boogie Woogie,” 17; Verne Streckfus, interview digest, September 22, 1960, Hogan Jazz Archives, Tulane University, New Orleans, cited on p. 197 of William Howland Kenney, Jazz on the River (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Also Kenney, 40, 42, 125; Interview with William Howland Kenney, December 2005, www.jerryjazzmusician.com/linernotes/william_kenney.html. In his Jerry Jazz Musician interview, Kenney says that “Catalano was treated by Down Beat as the spokesperson for white jazz musicians who played on the river, and he was frequently interviewed about this when they wanted to write about jazz on the river.”
11. Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues: Perry Bradford’s Own Story (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 31.
12. Borneman, “Boogie Woogie,” 17; William Patton, A Guide to Historic Downtown Memphis (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2010), 32; “Beale Street Memorabilia,” http://historic-memphis.com/memphis-historic/beale/bealestreet.html; W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography, pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991 [orig. Macmillan, 1941]), xi, 152, 153. Patton says that the “Monarch Club,” which “attracted all sorts of patrons, including W. C. Handy,” did not open until 1910, but the Historic Memphis Beale Street web page displays an advertisement, said to date from 1908, for a “Monarch Saloon” at the same address. In his autobiography, Handy gives a notated example of the piano style that Benny French and Sonny Butts (but not Seymour Abernathy) played at the Monarch, citing it as the musical inspiration for his own “Beale Street Blues” and “Yellow Dog Blues.” The example does not, however, include an “eight to the bar” bass pattern. In the book’s foreword, Handy says that “Beale Street Blues” was inspired by a pianist at the Monarch whose name he didn’t know. “Yellow Dog Blues,” originally published as “Yellow Dog Rag” in 1914, does feature a boogie-style arpeggiated minor-third chord in the melody line, but not in the bass accompaniment. “Beale Street Blues,” originally published as “Beale Street” in 1916, uses a brief, un-boogie-like walking bass figure at the ends of the blues choruses.
13. Jelly Roll Morton, “Benny Frenchy’s Tune,” disc 4, tracks 11, 12, The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). Morton’s comments are transcribed on pp. 75–79 of the PDF file on disc 8. He gives the year on track 8, “Jelly’s Travels from Yazoo to Clarksdale,” transcribed on p. 71.
14. Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues (London: Cassell, 1965), 95, 96.
15. Guido van Rijn and Hans Vergeer, liner notes to James “Stump” Johnson, The Duck’s Yas-Yas-Yas, Agram Blues AB 2007 (1981).
16. Clarence Williams, Clarence Williams Presents: The “Boogie Woogie” Blues Folio: First “Boogie Woogie” Tunes of Clarence Williams, George Thomas and Charles “Cow Cow” Davenport, with Annotations by Clarence Williams (New York: Clarence Williams Publishing, 1940), 2.
17. Al Rose, Eubie Blake (New York: Schirmer Books, 1979), 26, 42, 43. If one takes Blake’s word for his birth year, he would have been sixteen years old when he composed the complex, advanced, and highly original “Charleston Rag.” If Peter Hanley’s research is correct, Blake would have been only twelve. (See note 46, chapter 2.)
18. Judge Learned Hand, opinion in Fred Fisher, Inc. v. Dillingham, 298 F. 145 (S.D.N.Y. 1924), http://cip.law.ucla.edu/cases/1920-1929/Pages/fredfisherdillingham.aspx.
19. Peter J. Silvester, A Left Hand Like God: A History of Boogie-Woogie Piano (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 77, 78; Mike Rowe, liner notes to Sippie Wallace, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 2, Document Records DOCD-5400 (1995). Silvester mentions a rumor that Hersal Thomas was poisoned by a jilted girlfriend as well as Sippie Wallace’s opinion that he died of accidental food poisoning; but Rowe notes that his death certificate identifies the cause of death as “acute gall-bladder.”
20. Russell, “Boogie Woogie,” 189.
21. “Meade Lux Lewis: A Blues Man’s Story,” Down Beat, February 19, 1959, 17.
22. Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 40; John Chilton, Who’s Who of Jazz: Storyville to Swing Street (New York: Time-Life Records Special Edition, 1978 [orig. Chilton Book Company, 1972]), 143. Quoting his own interviews with Dorsey, Harris identifies Heywood as one of Dorsey’s early influences.
23. E. Simms Campbell, “Blues,” Jazzmen, ed. Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith (New York: Limelight Editions, 1967 [orig. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939]), 112, 113.
24. Williams, Clarence Williams Presents: The “Boogie Woogie” Blues Folio, 2.
25. Williams, Clarence Williams Presents: The “Boogie Woogie” Blues Folio, 11.
26. David Evans, liner notes to Texas Piano—Vol. 1 (1923–1935), Document Records DOCD-5334 (1994).
27. Silvester, A Left Hand Like God, 22.
28. Karl Gert zur Heide, Deep South Piano: The Story of Little Brother Montgomery (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 16–18.
29. Heide, Deep South Piano, 18, 19.
30. Heide, Deep South Piano, 20, 21, 29, 30. Big Joe Williams, BBC interview, Chicago, 1976, cited in Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978 [orig. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1976]), 79; Silvester, A Left Hand Like God, 29 [“barrelhouses”]. In the BBC interview, Williams says he played with Montgomery at a “camp” where “sometimes the women dance on top of the piano.” In Heide’s book, he identifies the venue as a brothel.
31. Silvester, A Left Hand Like God, 27. Silvester cites a 1960 recording of “Santa Fe Train” by the Texas pianist Buster Pickens, in which Pickens mentions playing at a sawmill, but Pickens was born in 1916, too late to have participated in the formative process of boogie-woogie.
32. Bob Hall, liner notes to Shake Your Wicked Knees: Rent Parties and Good Times, Yazoo Records 2035 (1998).
33. Silvester, A Left Hand Like God, 111, 112; Bob Koester, “The Saga of Speckled Red,” Jazz Report (January 1962): 14, 15, 27. Silvester’s account of Speckled Red’s life is based on Koester’s article, which in turn is based on an interview with Speckled Red, but Silvester appears to take some liberties. He tells how Red, having left Detroit, hopped freight trains during the time he was playing “the sawmill camps of the Piney Woods”; but Koester has Red riding the rails in the Midwest after World War I and makes no mention of sawmill camps at all, instead saying that Red left Detroit around 1929 and joined a medicine show in Tennessee shortly before recording “The Dirty Dozen” in Memphis.
34. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, That American Rag: The Story of Ragtime from Coast to Coast (New York: Schirmer, 2000), 85).
35. “Boogie No. 1 (Cow Cow Boogie),” Cow Cow Davenport—Volume 3: The Unissued 1940s Acetate Recordings, Document Records DOCD-5586 (1997).
36. Borneman, “Boogie Woogie,” 17.
37. Blesh and Janis, They All Played Ragtime, 192.
38. Silvester, A Left Hand Like God, 46, 47. Michael Montgomery, liner notes to Jimmy Blythe 1924–1931, RST Records JPCD-1510-2 (1994); “More Wonderful Ragtime in June,” http://www.ragfest.com/ocrs_archives/2002_jun.html. “More Wonderful Ragtime in June,” a review of the June 15, 2002, gathering of the Orange County Ragtime Society, describes a performance by pianist Bob Pinsker of “Syncophonic No. 4” and “Syncophonic No. 6” in which Pinsker says that “Christensen . . . didn’t write any of the pieces [in ‘Syncophonics’] but, rather, lifted ‘bits and pieces’ of them from various Jimmy Blythe piano rolls.”
39. Sharon A. Pease, “I Saw Pinetop Spit Blood and Fall,” Down Beat, October 1, 1939, 4, 18.
40. Jelly Roll Morton, “The Dirty Dozen,” disc 5, track 1, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). The quotation is transcribed on p. 83 of the PDF file on disc 8.
41. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York: Schirmer, 1998), 58, 59, 130.
42. John Hammond, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 1981 [orig. Ridge Press/Summit Books, 1977]), 164.
43. Judge Michael L. Igoe, opinion in Shapiro, Bernstein v. Miracle Record, 91 F. Supp. 473 (N.D. Ill. 1950), http://cip.law.ucla.edu/cases/1950-1959/Pages/shapiromiracle.aspx.
44. Russell, “Boogie Woogie,” 188.
45. Robert Palmer, “Rock Begins,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music, ed. Anthony Decurtis and James Henke with Holly George-Warren (New York: Straight Arrow Publishers/Random House, 1992 [orig. Jim Miller, ed., Rolling Stone Press/Random House, 1976]), 4.
46. John Hammond, “Plenty of ‘Swing’ Talent Hidden in Chicago,” Down Beat, May 1936, 2; “‘Jitter-Bugs’ Thrill at N.Y. Jam-Session: 17 Bands Swing for 3-Hours in Huge ‘Clam-Bake,’” Down Beat, June 1936, 8, 9.
47. Ken Vail, Count Basie: Swingin’ the Blues, 1936–1950 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 10. Most discographies give the recording date as October 9, 1936, but Vail’s detailed chronology, illustrated with concert posters, has Basie playing his farewell show in Kansas City on October 3, making his Chicago debut on November 6, and cutting the Vocalion sides on November 9.
48. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 110.
49. Pete Johnson as told to Johnny Simmen, “My Life, My Music,” The Pete Johnson Story, ed. Hans J. Mauerer (New York: private publication, 1965 [orig. Jazz Journal 12, no. 8 (August 1959)]), 22.
50. Dahl, Morning Glory, 110.
51. Peter J. Levinson, Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 60.
52. Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese, Fats Waller (New York: Schirmer, 1977), 126. Fats Waller did record a solo piano number featuring a boogie-woogie bass line—“Alligator Crawl,” from November 1934, a Waller composition that Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven had recorded (without the bass line) in 1927—but the short boogie passages contrast sharply with the more refined stride piano on the rest of the piece.
53. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 764.
54. Will Friedwald, liner notes to Will Bradley & Ray McKinley: Best of the Big Bands, Columbia Records CK 46151 (1990). Friedwald quotes drummer Ray McKinley, who sings the lyrics, giving Hammond credit for extending the song into a two-sided record.
55. Lionel Hampton with James Haskins, Hamp: An Autobiography, 1st pbk. ed. (New York: Amistad Press, 1993 [orig. Warner Books, 1989]), 91.
56. Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1978), 66.
57. John Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994 [orig. Quartet Books, 1992]), 60.
58. Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, 110; Todd Bryant Weeks, Luck’s in My Corner: The Life and Music of Hot Lips Page (New York: Routledge, 2008), 172, 173. Weeks, citing an article in the December 15, 1945, edition of the New York Amsterdam News, says that Hot Lips Page claimed to have written “Caldonia.”
59. Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, 128.
60. Shaw, Honkers and Shouters, 64.
61. J. C. Marion, “Long Gone: Sonny Thompson,” issue 43, JammUpp Vol. 2, http://home.earthlink.net/~v1tiger/sonnyt.html; Robert Pruter and Robert L. Campbell, “Sult1. ‘Sonny’ Thompson” on “The Sultan Label,” http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/sultan.html.
62. Robert Pruter and Robert L. Campbell, “Miracle Records,” http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/miracle.html.
63. Robert Pruter, Chicago Soul (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 236.
64. “Little Richard Biography,” http://rockhall.com/inductees/little-richard/bio/.
65. Charles Shaar Murray, Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002 [orig. 2000]), 127.
66. Murray, Boogie Man, 123, 127.