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Boogie Woogie has stylistic influences from folk, gospel, ragtime and honky tonk that go back to 1910 in the southern United States. The most important and typical instrument is the piano.

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A certain Joe Dudlow would frequent use this blues -based playing pattern for the first time. It was around 1900 known as ‘Dudlow Joes'.

Originally, the genre was not very popular, but it became more influential in the forties.

Boogie Woogie is a kind of plucked blues that became very popular in the late thirties and early forties. It finds its origin in piano music, with up to three pianos at once, guitar, big band, and country and western music and even gospel. Typical is the rumbling accompaniment with the left hand on the keyboard.

The constantly recurring pattern was played on the piano and used in the blues. Boogie Woogie music is characterized by an uptempo rhythm. There is a repeated melodic pattern in the bass with rising and falling strings, called a walking bass line, and a series of improvised variations in the treble. The bass (left hand) is as important as the (higher) melody (right hand). A barrel house is a pub with drinks from the barrel in the Southern States (U.S.), the pianist entertained there rough customers. The characteristic rhythm and feel of the boogie was later adapted for guitar, bass and other instruments.


Peter Silvester says in his book about boogie woogie "Left Hand Like God, the story of Boogie Woogie" that in 1929 ‘boogie woogie’ is used to describe dance or music from the city of Detroit.

The earliest record of boogie woogie as sheet music comes from 1916. It is a publication of New Orleans Hop Scop Blues by the Texan pianist George W. Thomas. Boogie became popular with the Pinetop Boogie of Pinetop Smith in 1929. That scored at number 20 in the charts.

While the blues traditionally expresses all kinds of emotions, boogie woogie is mainly associated with dances. The lyrics of "Pinetop 's Boogie Woogie", consist entirely of dance instructions:

Now, when I tell you to hold it, I do not want you to move a thing.

And when I tell you to get it, I want you to Boogie Woogie!

The song was a short time later folloes by another example of pure boogie woogie, "Honky Tonk Train Blues" by Meade Lux Lewis.

So there was certainly influence by the former Southern Honky tonk music. The term "boogie" itself was early in use, e.g. Wilbur Sweatman's "Boogie Rag" which was recorded in April 1917.

"The Fives" was composed by George and Thomas Hersal from Texas, and already contains all the ingredients of modern Boogie Woogie.

In the thirties boogie woogie gained wider public attention by a number of popular concerts at Carnegie Hall.

Early 40s it belonged to the Swing style of the Big Bands. Names like The Andrew Sisters, Tommy Dorsey ' band, Louis Jordan and Glen Miller probably do still ring a bell. Between '45 and '50 there was a lot of influence from country and blues to boogie, but also vice versa (Bill Haley). Other known names in this genre are Fats Domino and Little Richard or the Doo - Wop sound of mainly black vocal groups like The Drifters or The Coasters.

The audience loved boogie songs because the pace was perfect for the then popular dances like the jitterbug and the Lindy Hop. Country singers also started playing in the late thirties, when Johnny Barfield recorded "Boogie Woogi ". The Delmore Brothers showed with "Freight Train Boogie" how country and blues coalesced into a new genre that would become known as rockabilly. In the Sun Records rockabilly sound we recognize this country boogie piano play.

Thus became boogie in the fifties part of the emerging rockabilly and rock and roll styles with as a familiar name Jerry Lee Lewis.
Later it became less popular and mid fifties its related form, rock & roll, became the most popular style. Mid seventies went boogie back to his roots and "to boogie" meant "dancing in a disco ballroom." In the eighties, country bands as The Charlie Daniels Band used boogie woogie in songs such as the "Boogie Woogie Fiddle Country Blues (1988)".

Classics include Bette Midler in 1973 with a remake of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" which in 1941 was already a hit for the Andrews Sisters. It scored again in 2006 as "Candyman" by Christina Aguilera. Other well-known songs with a boogie rhythm or bass pattern "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, "Shadoogie" by The Shadows and "Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis.

If today we speak of rock 'n' roll, is thus also the from boogie woogie resulting acrobatic dance (acro - rock) meant that came into vogue in 1955 and spread throughout Europe and the U.S. in the late fifties.