This week Spinning Tales will be taking a tour through the raucous, upbeat piano blues that had emerged as dance music in the barrelhouses and juke joints of the south at the end of the 19th century and had found its way into the bars and dancehalls of the urban north as the recording industry took off in the 1920's.
Often played in the same 12 bar chord structure as the guitar based blues, what became known as the boogie woogie, had a distinctive percussive quality, relying on a strong left hand bass line and distinctive treble embellishments on the piano.
That may sound awfully technical, but if you tune into the show or take a spin through a few of this week's YouTube selections you'll catch the drift. It'll sound quite familiar. Whether these artist are labeled barrelhouse players or masters of the boogie woogie--and some are called both by various writers--to folks of my age, (Michael's too) it sounds a whole lot like the "rock and roll" that we heard as kids from the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley. A rose is a rose is a rose.
Boogie Woogie, which became incredibly popular after producer John Hammond's legendary From Spirituals to Swing 1938 Carnegie Hall concert featuring Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis , got it's name from the 1928 Vocalion recording by Clarence "Pinetop" Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie", but George and Hersal Thomas's 1921 composition, "The Fives" seems to be the first published version.
As we'll hear this week from artists like Blind LeRoy Garnett, Roosevelt Sykes, Charlie Spand who first recorded in 1929 with Blind Blake, Louise Johnson (who recorded with Charlie Patton, Son House, and Willie Brown), Little Brother Montgomery, Charles Avery and others, Boogie Woogie piano was pretty widespread and quite popular in the world of African American musicians long before it became the "craze" it did in the larger society in the late 30's and 40's.Early on, this piano based up-beat blues also became the heart of small combos of musicians. Horn players, sax players, drummers and bass players added texture--and volume--to the music as it was played in larger and larger clubs in the burgeoning African American populations in the urban north and midwest.
Albert Ammons formed a group The Jazz Kings, (one music historian characterized Boogie Woogie as a "jazzy blues") and as the music gained in popularity Wild Bill Moore brought the saxophone to prominence with what some folks characterized the "jump blues", Jay McShann assembled a big band introducing a young saxophonist named Charlie Parker to the world of recordings. Then after his service in World War Two, McShann pared it back to smaller groups with "blues shouter" Jimmy Witherspoon and saxophonist Ben Webster.
By the time the Boogie Woogie "craze" started to recede as the recording market started to shift to a "new" musical form called "rock and roll", marketing it to a young white audience in the mid 1950's, Albert Ammons had played at Harry Truman's Presidential inauguration in 1949, Count Basie's "Boogie" was one of his signature songs, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra's big band rendition of "Boogie Woogie" was their biggest record with 5 million copies sold--and Kansas City had joined New Orleans, Memphis and Chicago as music annals of music history.
Clarence "Pinetop" Smith, didn't live to see this all happen. He died at age 24 in 1929, the day before a scheduled second recording session for Vocalion. But, another boogie woogie pianist, Joseph William Perkins, who became known as "Pinetop" after recording Smith's song in the early 1950's continued to entertain audiences, playing with the Earl Hooker, Muddy Waters and others and winning a Grammy at age 97 a month before passing away on March 21 of this year. (See his bio in the right hand column, page one)
