Anderson Meade Lewis was known as Meade Lux Lewis (1905-1964). While he did not invent Boogie Woogie, he is a good place to start the conversation. Meade was from Chicago which in the 1920s was becoming a leading center for Boogie Woogie music.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Just what is Boogie Woogie anyway?

As I often say when trying to explain anything to anyone (who is not my wife), “I am no expert”. Surprisingly she is still not convinced, where was I? Yes, a definition.

Boogie Woogie Beginnings

It’s a bit hard to define precisely from what I have read over the years. Carnegie Hall played a very important part in the genre so I looked to their website for a definition. I can’t find a better one, and my reading and notes just won’t gel for me so here it is from Carnegie.

“Boogie-woogie, primarily a piano-based style, is one of the most rhythmically intense forms of blues music. Its evolution began in the late 1800s among pianists in the rough-and-tumble city taverns and rural juke joints, and it spread to the traveling vaudeville shows. It was a feature in the barrelhouses in the logging, sawmill, turpentine, levee, and railroad camps throughout the South. In Texas the piano style was known as “fast western.” The basic boogie-woogie rhythm, an outgrowth of ragtime and rural blues, is said to have been inspired by the rhythmic clacking of steam locomotives throughout the Deep South”.

We know a few things more specifically, the suggestion is the origins may be from Piney Woods, Texas. It was there in the 1870s that Black piano players seemed to have developed the style while playing at the nearby camps mentioned in the definition. It’s typified by the left hand holding a bass pattern (a walking bass line), and the right hand playing a counter pattern with more variety. You may have heard the term “Left Hand of/like God”¹.

Some reading I did suggests it and the sort of low-level Barrelhouse (cheap saloons) music is one and the same. It’s true in the early days there were similarities and many played in a hybrid of Barrelhouse/Ragtime/Boogie Woogie with the latter evolving far beyond, having a distinctive style.

This sound gave a great dance beat and small buildings were erected at these camps and a piano was put in place for the workers to let off some steam. The piano players began to travel from camp to camp and more and more people, both blacks and whites were learning the style. Oh, and that Meade Lux Lewis song “Honky Tonk Train Blues” was a real thing, trains with pianos and no seats, just a dance floor. By the early 1900’s the music was now ubiquitous throughout the South and players shared stages with the other Blues players of the day.

Well, it turns out you just can’t keep a good thing to yourself and that right hand was adding more melodies, riffs, licks, and any number of fancy things (technical term). Like other forms of The Blues, it was transported North during the Great Migration. St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago in particular were really boogie-woogie-ing. We had stuff going “Down in New Orleans”² as well.

Now, a hundred things were going on with Boogie Woogie, but I am writing a blog post here so I am compressing things a lot. For example, apart from as mentioned above, there is an intersection here with Stride Jazz. And don’t get me started on the guitar players like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Big Bill Broonzy who were exposed to it and incorporated this style.

Early Names

I could toss you dozens of names from Romeo Nelson to Cripple Clarence and Roosevelt Sykes but let’s follow one particular path. Practitioners such as the Composer George Washington Thomas (“The New Orleans Hop Scop Blues“) and his brother Hersal, brought it to Chicago. This is where pioneer Jimmy Yancy would come into the picture and influence Meade Lux Lewis and his childhood friend Albert Ammons. A third player, Pinetop Smith who had played in Ma Rainey’s band came to Chicago on the advice of another very important early boogie-woogie-style piano player known as Cow Cow Davenport. Smith’s “Pinetop’s Blues” and “Pinetops Boogie Woogie” from 1928 are genre standards. As it happens Meade and Albert would also learn from Pinetop and at one point they were rooming together in Chicago.

The Depression arrived and the dollars for buying records were few and Boogie Woogie piano was rarely recorded and mostly relegated to shows in the South. The whole live entertainment industry was suffering along with almost everyone else. So for Meade and other musicians, there were no venues in Chicago where he could get a gig. That would change in 1938 when John Hammond found him washing cars for a living and gave him an invitation.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Sometime back I did a guest piece for Turntable Talk 11 where I wrote about the important event called the From Spirituals to Swing concerts, the first (one at least) was a tribute to the late Bessie Smith and held at Carnegie Hall on December 23, 1938, and a second show a year later on December 24, 1939. As part of many legendary leaders in music, that first event featured Count Basie, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the first concert was the setting for a debut performance of some of the recently deceased Robert Johnson’s songs. The second show it was the Benny Goodman Sextet and returning was Count Basie and this time with vocalist Helen Humes.

The event was organized by John Hammond who I have spoken about many times and his importance to American music cannot be understated. When he found Meade in Chicago he asked him to play this gig at Carnegie Hall. Among the many Blues, Big Band and Gospel artists singing/playing, were his friends Albert Ammons and Pinetop Smith. Along with Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, over the two shows they would perform Boogie Woogie Piano for the first time before a New York audience. This led to appearances at many New York venues including the swanky Café Society nightclub, which opened in 1939.

The Proliferation

Soon Boogie Woogie, sometimes more in name than style was showing up everywhere. Yes, I do mean everywhere. And why not, the music was a lot of fun. From The Andrew Sisters “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (1941) to Judy Garland and Novelty Songs and it had already found its way into Texas Swing. We even had Country and Western Music star Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Shotgun Boogie”. It was in Big Band music, Tommy Dorsey, etc., and in a small way, other forms of Jazz Music (the purists hated it). You had Cab Calloway using it in his act to any number of songs with some kind of “Boogie” and or “Woogie” in it or in the title. And movies, of course.

On the downside you had Meade Lux Lewis refused membership into ASCAP, the publishing organization that would have allowed him to collect royalties from his song that I started the post with “Honky Tonk Train Blues”. It now has nearly 100 versions. After a bit of a battle he was allowed to join ASCAP in 1942. Unfortunately this was after Bob Crosby and His Orchestra had sold many records with his “Honky Tonk Train Blues” in 1939 and “Yancy Blues” in 1938.

Until it was reversed after he was exposed by John Hammond, Decca Executive Jack Kapp copyrighted the words “Boogie Woogie” in an effort to control (collect royalties) from all the so-named songs including the pioneering Smith’s “Pinetops Boogie Woogie”, which was the first time the words were used in a recorded song title.

As with any good thing, the high never lasts. Remember that Swifties. There was a downturn and of course, there had been and still are the detractors as well. Jelly Roll Morton, said to be an early proponent had a clause in his contract stating he could not be asked to perform a Boogie Woogie song. Others would call it rudimentary music and lacking in any artistic merit.

Still, the style now included tunes from the guitar, ensembles, and whole orchestras. As for the piano players some more than others were adept at many styles but if Boogie Woogie was your forte you needed to find an audience.

Despite the lack of interest in most of the US, as I alluded to earlier some people in New Orleans were feeling differently. So were many Europeans. You may have heard about some of that, and this whole Rock and Roll thing, something familiar there as well.

It sounds like we need a Part 2. This has been a long one so we will give it a few days before I write/post it. In the meantime, over the next while, I will just send out a couple clips of some of the great names in Boogie Woogie. Thanks for reading as always.

1. Further reading: The Story of Boogie-Woogie: A Left Hand Like God by Peter J. Silvester ↩︎
2. That’s a Dr. John song reference ↩︎