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.

Boogie-woogie musicians traveled the barrelhouse circuit providing entertainment and music for dancing. Many began their professional careers performing on traveling medicine shows, Black vaudeville circuits. In the North, they performed at house parties at which an admission fee was charged and food and drink were sold in order for the tenant to be able to pay the rent. Boogie-Woogie musicians later found regular employment in clubs.

The pianist Charles “Cow Cow” Davenport made the earliest recordings that can be described as boogie-woogie during the early 1920s, while the first hit record in the genre was Clarence “Pinetop” Smith’s “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie” (1928). Boogie-woogie lost popularity during the Depression Era but came back into style at the end of the 1930s, with pianists such as Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson. It peaked from then into the 1940s when it was adapted by the swing bands (Bennie Moten and Count Basie) as well as rhythm & blues (Louis Jordan and Joe Liggins) and early rock ‘n’ roll artists, such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Later in the 20th century, New Orleans “piano professors” such as “Professor Longhair” (Roy Byrd), Allen Toussaint and “Dr. John” (Mac Rebennak) also performed it in a recognizable style that came to be called “New Orleans Piano,” incorporating Caribbean rhythms, what “Jelly Roll” Morton called “the Latin tinge” as can be heard in the left-hand (bass) rhythm of “Tipitina.”

Boogie-Woogie is characterized by a repetitive eight-beat-to-the-bar “walking” piano bass line (eighth notes in 4/4 time) in which the left hand emphasizes each note of the chord. The right hand is on top and improvises a syncopated melody in counter rhythm. The combination creates a continuous drive. “The Fives,” a tune published as sheet music in 1922, contains all the modern boogie-woogie left-hand combinations. Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis said that many pianists in the 1920s played it just before leaving to take a break.