Billy Vaughn:
GREATEST BOOGIE WOOGIE HITS (1964)
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Nobody knows where boogie-woogie came from. Very Probably, like ragtime, it was a form of banjo or guitar music before it was adapted to the piano. Certainly the boogie-woogie ostinato – the heavily accented left hand figures that are repeated throughout each performance – has its roots in the South, the Southwest and the Midwest, where the folk blues singers used these rhythms to accompany themselves.
Whatever its background, boogie-woogie reached a peak of intensity in Chicago in the 1920s. It was there that Jimmy Yancey, whom some experts now consider to have been the chief catalyst of the movement, settled down after a peripatetic singing and dancing career. Yancey and the other boogie-woogie pioneers were in the great demand at “rent parties”, held at private apartments with the objective of raising enough cash to pay the landlord.
In those days of almost total social segregation, boogie-woogie was played exclusively by and for Negroes and was unknown outside the world of what were than referred to as “race” records. Among the minute number of white observers then interested in jazz fan named John Hammond (later to become internationally known as the discoverer of Count Basie and Billie Holiday). Hammond was fascinated by the unusual patterns of a performance called Honky Tonk Train Blues, recorded in 1929 on an independent label by an obscured pianist named Meade Lux Lewis. Determined to find the creator of this extraordinary work, in 1935 he searched Chicago’s South Side for days and eventually found Lewis, who had drifted out of music and was employed as a car-washer. Hammond brought him out of the garage and into a recording studio to cut a new version of Honky Tonk Train Blues. The record created a mild selsation; white America had heard nothing comparable before, and within a year or two several other pianists had emerged from limbo and were in demand for records and night club appearances.
Clarence (Pinetop) Smith believed to have been a disciple of Yancey, and himself a pioneer in the eight-to-the-bar idiom, was not among those benefited from the discovery of boogie-woogie. He was accidentally killed in 1929, in a Chicago Masonic Hall brawl shortly after he had recorded the memorable piano-with-monologue record, Pinetops Boogie Woogie, that effectively launched the name by which this piano style came to bew known. It wa not until six years after his death that Pinetops Boogie Woogie was recorded by Cleo Brown and gained widespread popularity.
Although at first all boogie-woogie solos were based on the blues, the gradual popularisation of the form led to its adaptation to Tin Pan Alley songs, public domain melodies and the like. Bob Crosby’s Highly esteemed band recorded Boogie Woogie Maxixe in 1939; a year later Artie Shaw’s Gramercy 5 cut Summit Ridge Drive. But that time the new Will Bradley band, featuring drummer-vocalist Ray McKinley, had achieved a substantial reputation through the use of novelty songs about boogie-woogie; many of them were written by Don Raye, three of those works are represented here.
Whether in its original deep-dish blues context or in the more commercially accectable transformations, boogie-woogie has turned out to be a remarkable of all is that had it not been for one man, and hos obsession with one record, it might have died a natural death three dacades ago.
Nobody knows where boogie-woogie came from. Very Probably, like ragtime, it was a form of banjo or guitar music before it was adapted to the piano. Certainly the boogie-woogie ostinato – the heavily accented left hand figures that are repeated throughout each performance – has its roots in the South, the Southwest and the Midwest, where the folk blues singers used these rhythms to accompany themselves.
Whatever its background, boogie-woogie reached a peak of intensity in Chicago in the 1920s. It was there that Jimmy Yancey, whom some experts now consider to have been the chief catalyst of the movement, settled down after a peripatetic singing and dancing career. Yancey and the other boogie-woogie pioneers were in the great demand at “rent parties”, held at private apartments with the objective of raising enough cash to pay the landlord.
In those days of almost total social segregation, boogie-woogie was played exclusively by and for Negroes and was unknown outside the world of what were than referred to as “race” records. Among the minute number of white observers then interested in jazz fan named John Hammond (later to become internationally known as the discoverer of Count Basie and Billie Holiday). Hammond was fascinated by the unusual patterns of a performance called Honky Tonk Train Blues, recorded in 1929 on an independent label by an obscured pianist named Meade Lux Lewis. Determined to find the creator of this extraordinary work, in 1935 he searched Chicago’s South Side for days and eventually found Lewis, who had drifted out of music and was employed as a car-washer. Hammond brought him out of the garage and into a recording studio to cut a new version of Honky Tonk Train Blues. The record created a mild selsation; white America had heard nothing comparable before, and within a year or two several other pianists had emerged from limbo and were in demand for records and night club appearances.
Clarence (Pinetop) Smith believed to have been a disciple of Yancey, and himself a pioneer in the eight-to-the-bar idiom, was not among those benefited from the discovery of boogie-woogie. He was accidentally killed in 1929, in a Chicago Masonic Hall brawl shortly after he had recorded the memorable piano-with-monologue record, Pinetops Boogie Woogie, that effectively launched the name by which this piano style came to bew known. It wa not until six years after his death that Pinetops Boogie Woogie was recorded by Cleo Brown and gained widespread popularity.
Although at first all boogie-woogie solos were based on the blues, the gradual popularisation of the form led to its adaptation to Tin Pan Alley songs, public domain melodies and the like. Bob Crosby’s Highly esteemed band recorded Boogie Woogie Maxixe in 1939; a year later Artie Shaw’s Gramercy 5 cut Summit Ridge Drive. But that time the new Will Bradley band, featuring drummer-vocalist Ray McKinley, had achieved a substantial reputation through the use of novelty songs about boogie-woogie; many of them were written by Don Raye, three of those works are represented here.
Whether in its original deep-dish blues context or in the more commercially accectable transformations, boogie-woogie has turned out to be a remarkable of all is that had it not been for one man, and hos obsession with one record, it might have died a natural death three dacades ago.
1) Guitar Boogie 02:18
2) Pinetop's Boogie Woogie-versin 2 02:14
3) Honky Tonk Train 02:30
4) Humoresque Boogie 01:58
5) In A Little Spanish Town 02:10
6) Swanee River Boogie 02:18
7) Down The Road A Piece 02:18
8) Beat Me Daddy, Eight To The Bar-version 2 02:21
9) Summit Ridge Drive-version 2 02:14
10) Boogie Woogie Maxixe 02:13
11) Rhumboogie-version 2 02:10
12) Sabre Dance Boogie 02:40
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