We’ll come back around to these soon and go through them in full. It’s a simple four-beats-to-the-bar figure. For example, “The Marshall” bassline, the most primitive version of the boogie-woogie pattern, originated in Marshall, Texas. Specific boogie-woogie style basslines are named after different locations where they originated. These regional differences were so apparent that musicians could quickly tell where a performer was from based on their style. This Texan style differentiated from the slower New Orleans style of jazz and blues. The genre was also originally referred to as a “Fast Western”. The origin of boogie-woogie seems to be Texas in the late 1800s. The first time the actual spelling of “boogie-woogie” was used was in 1928 with Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie, which also conveniently contained dance instructions in the lyrics. But this, and other works with “boogie” in the title, didn’t yet represent what we know as boogie woogie.Ī track called “Weary Blues”, both the version from 1915 and from 1919, are the first recordings known to use the standard boogie-woogie bassline. The term “boogie” in sheet music started appearing around the turn of the 20 th Century, such as “That Syncopated Boogie-Boo” from 1913. These terms are consistent with the strong beat and wild dancing common to boogie woogie music. Then we have the word “bogi”, meaning “to dance”. We have “boog” and “booga”, meaning to beat a drum. There are three African words that probably contributed to the term “boogie woogie”. History of Boogie Woogie Where did the term “boogie woogie” come from? We’ll also look at the history and evolution of boogie-woogie, discuss key players, and I’ll share a Spotify playlist with some songs mentioned in this video if you’d like to dig deeper into the genre. That means it tends to be fast and upbeat, with a light-hearted spirit.īoogie-woogie is mainly defined by specific basslines, which we’ll talk about and demonstrate in this video. We’ve also done a video about another piano-based genre, ragtime, which you can check out.īoogie-woogie is all about dancing (unlike other blues music which is all about emotion). Once upon a time we looked at an overview of American music history, where we discussed Jazz, Rock and other American-born genres. In today’s episode of PianoTV we’ll be discussing Boogie-Woogie, a piano-centric branch on the jazz/blues music tree.

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