The Boogie Woogie Blues

Boogie-woogie is a popular style of Blues Music.  It is a piano-based style from the early 20^th century.  It has a very strong bass pattern associated with and originally piano players accompanied themselves by playing this strong bass pattern with their left hand.  Then a bass player was added and they would duplicate the piano player’s bass line.  As this style evolved more, the bassist would often play the entire boogie-woogie bass line themselves, and the pianist played entirely different piano parts.

Boogie-woogie became very popular in the 30s and 40s.  It started as solo piano but then grew to three pianos at once, guitar, big band, gospel, and even country and western music.  While the traditional blues usually depicts a variety of emotions, boogie-woogie was mainly associated with dancing.

For the most part boogie-woogie tunes are twelve bar tunes and it’s said to have been created in logging and turpentine camps, and oil boomtowns of Texas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta circa 1900.  The very first boogie-woogie hit was entitled “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie” by Pinetop Smith recorded in 1928 and first released in 1929. This was the first boogie-woogie recording to be a commercial hit, and helped establish boogie-woogie as the name of the style.

Boogie-woogie then gained further attention in 1938 and 1939 thanks to several concerts at Carnegie Hall.  And then it became only natural that swing bands began to implement the boogie-woogie beat into some of their music.  Famous dances known as the jitterbug and the Lindy Hop required the boogie-woogie beat.

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