Category: Blues

Boogie Woogie

randydafoe35 Comments
Meade Lux Lewis with his original composition first recorded in 1927 “Honky Tonk Train Blues”

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.

“Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” by (Clarence) Pinetop Smith. You could not have a better instructional audio. Among other things, he tells people to “mess around” which is a dance move. That’s what Boogie Woogie was all about.

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

The Andrew Sisters “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”

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.

Sugar Chile Robinson was born in 1938 and is still with us today at age 85.

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.

The amazing Martha Davis. “Martha’s Boogie”. That’s her husband Calvin Ponder on Bass.

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 ↩︎

The Del Lords – Randy’s Rarities

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“Get Tough” was released in 1986, written by Scott Kempner

The Del-Lords were the brainchild of Scott Kempner and formed in New York in 1982. They had a great retro sound. A bit Rockabilly, a bit Garage Rock and a good example of what’s been called Roots Rock.

They put out some great tunes, I think anyway but failed to make a lot of traction and disbanded in 1990, some former members got together without Kempner and well, it’s just not the same.

I find a lot of my music through cover songs, big surprise I know. It often comes in quite unexpected ways, and this is how I stumbled upon The Del Lords. One of my favorite Bruce Springsteen Albums is The Seeger Sessions (2006), where he covered a lot of old Folk Songs, in tribute of course to the legendary Pete Seeger. One of the songs was unknown to me “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” written about The Great Depression by Blind Alfred Reed and released in 1930. Later I would find out Reed was a recording pioneer, a story for another day.

In researching this once-obscure song I found that The Del Lords had recorded this song back in 1984 and were only the fourth to cover it. Of note, Ry Cooder was just the second person to cover it in 1970 but that was long before I discovered his music and actually, at the time of my initial research I didn’t know about his rendition at all. The song now has 18 versions.

Long story short it’s because of this song, I was led to The Del Lords. So thank you Alfred Reed. If you listen to the original lyrics, it’s surprisingly relevant in todays world.

“When we pay our grocery bill, We just feel like making our will”

My Blues quota coda…

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After talking about the King (B.B.) I think it’s a good time to switch gears. I covered many of the Delta greats, Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and more. I hope you have seen that all of these artists had a great amount of influence on others from many genre. There are many more names to talk about, more of the Chicago Blues, Buddy Guy, and Stevie Ray Vaughn for example.

So, as I tried to say in the title, it’s the end of talking about the Blues, for now. So many more names and places to go even though over the past six years I have probably done just shy of 100 posts dedicated to The Blues in some way or form. So, as I said for now, no more of the Delta or many of the other Blues greats. But I got to thinking a bit more, what exactly are The Blues?

We can look up any number of “text book” definitions such as this from The Library of Congress; “The blues” is a secular African-American musical genre that has had broad influence in popular music. Blues songs deal with a variety of topics and emotions, though it is often mistakenly thought that they deal almost exclusively with sorrow and protest.

There is some debate on what constitutes a ‘Blues’ song. So my earlier use of the adverb inaccurately suggests we can stick a pin on a map and say, there’s The Blues! The topic runs deeper than anything I can fathom let alone cover in one post. I mean how many books have been written by people who know what they are discussing. That said, I want to try and give a summary. It has to do with everything I have written about the Blues genre. Whether it’s Delta, Chicago, Memphis, Texas, Folk, Country, String Bands, or Big Bands, is it all The Blues?

I don’t have an answer for you but I did want to sort of talk it out a bit.

Most of you have heard the name of W.C. Handy. Songwriters certainly know him as he gets a mention in Marc Cohn’s, “Walking in Memphis”, Rodney Crowell’s “Bring it on Home to Memphis” and Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues” and more songs no doubt. In my quest to learn more about the genre, I do try and get to the source in my research. So I wondered how did Handy get the moniker of The Father of the Blues?

I did not read his 1941 autobiography called The Father of the Blues but I also can’t find any reference to the term before he published his book. So maybe someone called him that before, for instance his publisher? Maybe he just named himself. “Father” sort of implies the first, so I’m not sure it’s an entirely legitimate title. Now, this is not a post on Handy per se but he was born in the South, Alabama actually and he traveled a lot in the Delta area. His legacy is central to what I am attempting to get at here.

W.C. Handy was not alone in his efforts, for example Hart Wand of Oklahoma wrote a 12 bar song called “Dallas Blues” that was published in 1912. The first recorded version is by Maggie Jones in 1925.

There are some even earlier songs such Anthony Maggio’s “I Got the Blues” in 1908 and a couple more songs in a 12 or 16 bar format. These works come before or concurrent with W.C. Handy’s initial compositions.

The person getting the most attention is certainly W.C. Handy. His first published composition as in the clip above was, “The Memphis Blues”(1912) and it is miles away from the Delta Blues, but apparently, it was close in a structural way. He says that the Delta area is precisely where he learned what he translated into the now common 12 Bar Blues format. And perhaps he has been somewhat incorrectly credited as the first to put the musical notes on paper. Given the earlier examples.

There’s no evidence to suggest people did not create this independently. For Handy’s part, he discovered making a change in key while playing at a dance for Blacks in Mississippi. When he upped the tempo, people started really started to move. Being an educated man, a musician, and a teacher, he had the tools to put the puzzle together. He was serious about his music, and by all accounts worked hard for any success he had.

I am quickly getting out of my league here but as I understand, by ‘key’ most all Delta Blues songs were sung and played in G Major with insertions of minor keys and of course the unique bending of the notes. The now famous “Blue Note“. Among other things that make it the Blues. If you learned anything about the Delta Blues there’s not a lot of dance music in there.

If we jump ahead a couple years, in 1914 W.C. Handy published “St. Louis Blues” a song with those Minor key insertions, inspired in part by the Ragtime sounds he heard in Memphis. Ragtime was more piano-based and had been around for at least 20 years. Add in the recent import of Tango Dance music, and you have the predecessors to Jazz. Handy was creating a dance tune. Did you know that at the turn of the Century in England at least, when performing the then very much vulgar Tango, women had to wear bumpers on their dress so as not to actually touch their dance partners’ bodies? Sorry getting back to “St. Louis Blues”, just because it’s got “Blues” in the title, does that make it a Blues song?

From the book The Devils Music by Giles Oakley there’s some quotes from Texas Blues legend T. Bone Walker. He said “You can’t dress up the blues”, “I’m not saying that ‘Saint Louis Blues’ isn’t fine music you understand. But it just isn’t blues”.

So here we have a divide, Delta Blues was based on oral tradition, some song lyrics were written down but most were not and before Handy and a few others, Blues songs never had a musical note put on paper. What we learned about the Delta Blues is that it was a very localized creation, outside of any influence from W.C. Handy. Having said that when it came to the recording studio, having some sort of notation was helpful.

So along comes this fancy stuff, with horns and piano and where is the guitar? So how can W.C. Handy’s music be called the Blues? The music is connected, as I understand it, getting back to that written down/structured idea. There’s little doubt he had captured the music of the Delta and put notes to it. It just so happens it worked for dance tunes and, it works for Jazz music. Oh and R&B and Rock and Roll. Ok, I won’t go down that rabbit hole.

I will tell you that Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” is the tenth most recorded song (excluding Christmas songs) ever. It is primarily recorded by Jazz but also Blues and other genres performers. I refer you to the Blue Note that is integral to both genres. There are many vocal versions, but the majority of the now 1154 recordings are instrumental. The first release was the instrumental by Prince’s Band, recorded in December of 1915, released in February, 1916. Poor Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” I mentioned earlier only warrants 71 versions.

The vocal release was in 1918 but the first notable recording was from Marion Harris in 1920.

This song put the more formal ‘Blues’ on an upward trajectory. Now, no one is saying Handy invented the Blues. Nor did it become what it is based solely on one song. You can listen to a few hundred plus different Blues singers that had nothing to do with Handy. Apart from the Delta Blues, for example, doing her own thing at about the same time we had Blues Legend Ma Rainey (“Mother of the Blues”) from Georgia, on the fringes of the Delta, and as far as I know never ran across Handy. But there is quite a remarkable convergence.

Now to try and bring this to some kind of a salient point, Ma’s protégé Bessie Smith (The Empress of the Blues) did meet Handy but I believe it was only after she recorded his “St. Louis Blues”. What the now legendary Smith did with her vocal performance of the song sent it into a new orbit and on the way to international recognition. And W.C. Handy agreed.

I should point out that the recordings by both Ma and especially Bessie and others were most often done in studios, with seasoned musicians, producers, arranged music scores, etc. It was the music business, not the more quaint solo singing Blues singer you may have envisaged. Though that’s how it all started.

The “St. Louis Blues” itself as a musical score was groundbreaking stuff. But sung by Bessie Smith I guess we could say the ‘formal’ Blues song had it’s voice.

Just to keep matters as confusing as possible, many think that what Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were doing, and in particular with her “St. Louis Blues” is close to ground zero for Jazz Vocals as well. Given the distance from the Delta Blues this I think, it probably closer in nature. And as I mentioned when quoting the number of cover versions, there are more Jazz-type recordings of “St. Louis Blues” than there are Blues ones. Jazz music was in its infancy at this time as well. The sounds of New Orleans were already percolating and spreading quickly.

As I pointed to in one or more of my posts on the Delta Blues, there was a Gospel connection. So perhaps now is not a good time to bring up the those early connections. I thought not.

As you can imagine there is much more of a story attached to “St. Louis Blues”. For Bessie, it also includes her appearance in the first of two movies of the same name. I have mentioned Bessie Smith several times in past posts, but I am doing more research on all the Ladies of the Blues for a future series.

In the meantime there is an excellent post on Bessie Smith, just follow this link.

John Lee Hooker

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John Lee Hooker with a version of “Boogie Chillin'” and a backing band of remarkable talent.

John Lee was born the son of a sharecropper in Tutwiler Mississippi on August 22, 1917. Although accounts vary. He died at age 83 on June 21, 2001. He combined his Delta Blues upbringing with Hill Country Blues which had a more rhythmic groove to the music, the end result being “Boogie Blues”. Listen to “Boogie Chillen’” as performed in the above video clip. It was his first recording which he wrote and was released in 1948 and it will give you a good idea where a song like “Boom, Boom” came from.

While many of the Delta greats landed in Chicago, Hooker would end up in Detroit in 1943. He worked at the Ford plant and also as a Janitor at a Steel Mill before releasing his first song in 1948. I should note there are a few other Delta/Blues artists from the South that ended up in Detroit as well, contemporaries such as; Bobo Jenkins, Little Sonny, Boogie Woogie Red and Baby Boy Warren. A bit more of an R&B artist was the Alabama born Nolan Strong (& The Diablos) who was Smokey Robinson’s biggest influence.

For the most part Hooker was raised in the Clarksdale area of Mississippi were he learned the Delta Blues. At age 14 he ran away from home and played on Beale Street in Memphis. From this humble beginning, his song “Boom, Boom” released in 1962 is one of the most recognizable Blues Standards and at 85 versions and growing. He was an illiterate man but he authored over 50 songs, and 53 of his original songs have been covered by other artists. An arrangement of the song was used as the theme for NCIS New Orleans.

In 1951 there were two charts published by Billboard Magazine for R&B that only tracked the top ten songs each week. The first was “Best selling retail Rhythm and Blues Singles” the other called “Most played Juke Box Rhythm and Blues records” John Lee Hooker songs were was right in the mix with the Dominoes, Ruth Brown and Charles Brown.

He is a four time Grammy winner, plus a Lifetime Achievement Grammy among many other accolades. He is one of greatest guitarist of all time as well as an inductee into the Blues and R&R Hall of Fame. A true original talent and one of the coolest people ever, just watch this clip from the greatest Blues movie ever, ‘The Blues Brothers’.

If you think of ZZ Top and particularly “La Grange” (1973) btw, it’s written about the brothel immortalized in the play and film ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas‘. But if we compare it to John Lee Hooker who developed his own talking, hard driving, rhythm boogie blues style (pretty much unrelated to actual ‘Boogie Woogie’) you can certainly hear his very strong influence.

One of the greatest songs in Rock History is from the Who with “My Generation” (1965) written by Pete Townshend. Like with many of the British bands of that era the song has inspirations from American music. Townsend credits Mose Allison “Young Man Blues” (1957) with the spark to write the song and Roger Daltrey used John Lee Hooker’s somewhat ‘stuttering style’ for the vocal inspiration.

There are so many great covers of his songs and brilliant duets etc. with John Lee himself but to further demonstrate the scope of his influence I will leave you with just two more clips. First, Van Morrison joining Hooker and doing his original song “Wednesday Evening Blues”. Then a guitarist known as Guitar Rei, born in Japan, grew up in New York and does an amazing job with “Boom, Boom”. She goes off script a bit but so did John Lee on most occasions when he did this song live.

Howlin’ Wolf

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“How Many More Years” written and recorded by Howlin’ Wolf (1951)

Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 in White Station, Mississippi– January 10, 1976), known as Howlin’ Wolf . Here is another of the great Delta Blues singers. As a teen he was tutored on guitar by Charlie Patton, who was the very first name I talked about in this series. Using bits and pieces from songs by The Mississippi Sheiks, Tommy Johnson and Patton himself Wolf put a song together in the early 1930’s. “Crying at Daybreak” was part of his repertoire as toured the South with many of the names I have mentioned. He gained a reputation for his harmonica playing and was an early adaptor of the electric guitar. He was a large man and had quite the theatrical stage presence as well.

There is a certain amount of mystery surrounding his life story, in particular the late 1930’s up to 1941 when he in went into the army. He may have killed a man to protect a woman and may have gone to jail but we’re not sure. We do know there was another Blues singer from Texas named J.T. Smith who also went by the name of Howlin’ Wolf but very little is known of him.

What we do know is that Ike Turner who was at the time a talent scout for RPM/Modern Records found Wolf. He recorded the songs “Riding in the Moonlight” and “Morning at Midnight” and it charted at #10. He also recorded songs for Sam Philips at Sun Records, “How Many More Years” charted #4 and he also recorded “Crying at Daybreak”. Philips seemed quite high on Wolf but it was Leonard Chess that took over his contract and had him come to Chicago.

He reworked “Crying at Daybreak” while at Chess Records in Chicago and titled it “Smokestack Lightning” in 1956. It peaked at #8 on the R&B chart. There are 64 versions of this song but it is a perfect example of what most often happened with Black music from the South. Not a single American artist covered this song until it was discovered by bands in England.

Howlin’ Wolf had gone to the UK for a number of performances in 1964 and he of course did “Smokestack Lighting” and it made quite an impression. The first band to cover the song was Manfred Mann in 1964, followed by the Yardbirds and then The Animals.

There is a live recording at The Fillmore from 1968 (released in 1999) by a very good but short lived American group called Quicksilver Messenger Service. They are of particular note as members Skip Spence and David Freiberg would go on to help form Jefferson Airplane and lead singer Chet Powers, as Dino Valenti, he was the guy who wrote the song “Get Together” covered by The Youngbloods in 1967 that became a #5 hit in 1969.

While a big influence at Chess Records and in the Clubs his record sales did not do as well after his arrival, in great part due to poor promotion by the Record Company, but he cut many great sides and made a good living touring nevertheless.

“Killing Floor” written and performed by Howlin’ Wolf (March,1965). This song really shows off how immensely talented he was. Recorded in August of 1964. Here is a link to a live performance. There are 56 versions of this song. If you were taking notes this was the song I made a pretty lame hint at when I referenced “the cutting room floor” in my editing process from the introductory post Delta Blues Revisited. Hey, I don’t even know myself where I am going half the time.

“Killing Floor” by the late and great Jeff Healey. ‘The Jeff Healey Band from Live at Grossmans 1994, released in 2011.

“Red Rooster” was written by Willie Dixon and is Wolf’s most covered song with 133 versions. A total of 56 of Howlin’ Wolfs songs have been re-recorded. Names such as Dion, Delbert McClinton, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Cream, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Joe Bonamassa, Koko Taylor, Grateful Dead, B.B. King and more have done his songs.

“Red Rooster” was first released by Howlin’ Wolf in 1961 but it did not chart. It was first covered by Sam Cooke, he titled it “Little Red Rooster” in 1963 and it charted #11 on the Hot 100 and #7 on the R&B chart.

The Rolling Stones released it as “Little Red Rooster” in the UK (only) and reached #1 in December of 1964. This was the first and only time a Blues song has topped a chart in the UK. As you can see, Wolf is another of the very influential Delta Blues artist.

Follow this link to Music Mondays by Leon.