By The Landlord
“Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances." – Maya Angelou
“March to the beat of your own drummer.” – Henry David Thoreau
“I don't like no fancy chords. Just the boogie. The drive. The feeling.” – John Lee Hooker
There certainly is something strange going on – a feverish, chaotic scene at the Bar today. It all started when, out of the blue, Gloria Estefan suddenly breezed in, not merely to order some cocktails, but also to announce: “Hey! Is there are doctor in the house? Well, Doctor, I've got this feeling, deep inside of me, deep inside of me. I just can't control my feet won’t you help me…?”
“Well, I’m no doctor,” replied Peter Gabriel, excitedly, "but the rhythm is below me, the rhythm of the heat. The rhythm is around me, the rhythm has control. The rhythm is inside me, the rhythm has my soul.”
It sounded like he also needed some urgent attention, or at least an audience. But what was causing this heat, this fever? “Don't blame it on the sunshine. Don't blame it on the moonlight. Blame it on the boogie,” announced Michael Jackson with slick turn and twist and and a hip and groin thrust, adding his signature extra high ‘ooh’ to punctuate that input. Blame it on the what, Michael? But then he was interrupted by David Bowie, who ini that distinctive low voice, asked everyone to just calm down: “Hey, let the children use it, let the children lose it, let all the children boogie.” Fair enough, but just tread carefully Michael …
Clearly then, something has happened to some of the Song Bar punters this week. They seem to be gripped by a need to express themselves only via certain words. How come?
Most songs have rhythm, a beat and some of them even have a little dash of boogie, but a far fewer number actually refer to one or more them in lyrics. So this week, what seems to be occurring is we’re now not looking so much for songs containing these musical elements alone (that would never end…) but where each artist sings, talks, or shouts about one, two or all of those three things – rhythm, beat or boogie. Does the beat go on? Who has got that rhythm? Is the boogie really to blame? Where is it? In the city or the jungle, and does it affect or be attributed to certain instruments? And if these things are present, what kind of musical wonderland are they creating? I think you get the drift.
It's a technique some artists use as if they are talking to, as well as about, the musical genre or element itself, the equivalent of shouting to the trumpet or saxophone, the piano or guitar, but in this case a rhythmical element. The words themselves become like sounds, tools, instrument to bang, hit or blow, exclamations or reference points, expressions of feelings colouring and punctuating the song.
The cheeky smile and nimble fingers of Albert Ammons
Beat and rhythm are pretty unambiguous but also broad terms, but what exactly is boogie? It seems like a good time to explore this sometimes overused word. It's used in many contexts, including as a verb or noun pertaining to dance, but in musical terminology, it’s a repetitive, swung note or shuffle rhythm, a groove or pattern used in blues-based music originally played on the piano in boogie-woogie music and then adapted for guitar, saxophone, double bass and more. To get you in the mood, here’s a rather nice compilation of boogie greats, from Mead Lux Lewis to Jimmy Yancey, Albert Ammons, Clarence “Pinetop” Smith to Cleo Brown, Cripple Clarence Lofton to Pete Johnson, Montana Taylor to Blind Leroy Garnett, Romeo Nelson to Little Brother Montgomery giving us the music, but, rather crucially, they aren’t so singing or talking about it, so they are only inspiration for, rather than particular songs suited to this topic.
Boogie-woogie itself is a style popularised in the late 1920s, but developed in African-American communities in the 1870s. What’s particularly interesting is where the word comes from, a variety of African sources – “Boog” comes from the Hausa Chadic language from sub-Saharan Africa, and “Booga” from the Mandingo language from Guinea and Senegal both meaning “to beat”. “Bogi” meanwhile is a West African word meaning to dance, and “"Mbuki Mvuki”, which obviously echoes “boogie” in sound, together most evocatively conjure up some frenzied fireside image, respectively mean "to take off in flight”, and "to dance wildly, as if to shake off one's clothes”.
With that image in mind, the actor Rosie Perez, who is also brilliant dancer herself, is now taking our Bar stage, and squeakily announces: "You can learn steps, but you cannot learn how to boogie." Rosie and her sister, brought up in Brooklyn would spend their youth going into New York clubs to dance for hours and hours. They would fight off offers of drink, drugs and male attention, just staying on the dancefloor for hours and hours. So she really knows how to boogie. Let’s see her in action, doing her thing at the beginning of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing:
But where did it all begin? There is a great book on the subject, Peter J. Silvester’s The Story of Boogie-Woogie: A Left Hand Like God. It’s the left hand that supplies holds down that beat, rhythm and is the engine room of the boogie. Clarence “Pinetop” Smith is seen as a pioneer, a vaudeville performer based in Pittsburgh who then travelled in minstrel and vaudeville shows as a dancer, singer and comedian. He even travelled to the south and worked with artists such as Butterbeans & Susie and Ma Rainey. On 29 December 1928 Smith recorded his two breakthrough hits: “Pine Top Blues” and “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie.” This was the first time the phrase “boogie woogie” appeared on record. It’s pretty scratchy on this version, but behind it you can here his commanding presence, telling the listener all about it:
It’s a style that influenced pianists and other bandleaders everyone from Louis Jordan to Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis to Chuck Berry to James Brown. All of them exclamatory commentators on their genre. Chuck Berry said: “It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues … now it’s called rock.”
“Yes, I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me,” says Mose Allison.
Another great influencer was Jimmy Yancey, the Chicago pianist who was playing on the circuit fro 1915, and didn’t have massive personal success, but was more of a musicians’ musician.
Jimmy Yancey
And a third boogie-woogie great is Albert Ammons, who inaugurated the Blue Note record label by hammering out blues and boogie duets with Meade “Lux” Lewis. Let’s hear him doing the Boogie Woogie Stomp:
But this is the music itself. Our topic is, in any genre, songs that mention these three key words. So as usual we have a big crowd in beating out a rhythm to the bar in syncopated four-by-four formation to get down and boogie on about this topic. Who then is here to talk about rhythm in general?
Rhythm:
Our guests aren’t always who you might expect, well beyond the boogie-woogie or blues scene. “There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse,” says that master of arrhythmic work, Igor Stravinsky, with a flourish of his conductor’s baton, also adding: “I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.”
“Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous,” says Yehudi Menuhin.
"Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul," announces Plato, sagely. “Yes, rhythm is our universal mother tongue. It's the language of the soul,” add the American musician and dancer Gabrielle Roth.
For dance? “Well, the desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts,” adds Edith Wharton.
As this is a lyrical topic, we’re also visited by a few writers who emphasise, or indeed stress the rhythm of language.
“Indeed,” adds Edith Sitwell, pouring the tea. “Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality."
“And It is the silence between sounds that create rhythm,” says the Egyptian dancer and choreographer Nelly Mazloum.
"Perhaps of all the most basic elements of music, rhythm most directly affects our central nervous system. The rhythms of nature - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music,” expands George Crumb, American modern classical composer.
“Water? The ocean asks for nothing but those who stand by her shores gradually attune themselves to her rhythm,” adds Charles Dickens.
And staying outdoors, here’s Björk: “There's something about the rhythm of walking, how, after about an hour and a half, the mind and body can't help getting in sync."
“Yeah man,” says Jimi Hendrix, "Music is a safe type of high. It's more the way it was supposed to be. That's where highness came, I guess, from anyway. It's nothing but rhythm and motion."
Dr John
Beat and Boogie:
Beat that then. But what about beat? Beat is the rhythm of our heart of course, the bedrock of all music. "A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm,” reckons Ken Burns.
“Music is just about a beat and a message,” says the DJ, music historian Casey Kasem.
But what about other genres? Van the Man Morrison is in the house. Is he in a good mood? Let’s see. “Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.” And boogie woogie, Van? Suddenly he’s breaking into song for us.“All the girls walk by dressed up for each other, and the boys do the boogie woogie on the corner of the street.”
The heavyweights are now really filling up the Bar. Ike Turner is here, and he may have split with Tina, and be a bad-tempered bastard, but still knows his stuff and somewhat agrees with what Chuck Berry had to say: “Rock'n'roll is nothing but boogie woogie with stuff on top of it. And if you're black, they name it rhythm'n'blues, and if you're white, they name it rock’n'roll."
Here’s Johnny Otis to have is take on the terms. “People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we've created in America - cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.”
How about a bit of hip hop? "I go to Queens for queens to get the crew from Brooklyn, / Make money in Manhattan and never been tooken, / Go Uptown and the Bronx to boogie down,/ Get strong on the Island, recoup, and lay around,” raps Rakim.
And finally let’s here from the great New Orleans genre-spanning great, Dr John: “When I was a little bitty kid, my aunt showed me how to play a little boogie. It took me years. I had to play the left-hand part with two hands, because my hands was so little. Then as I grew up and I learned how to play the left-hand part with one hand, she showed me how to play the right-hand part, and et cetera. My Uncle Joe showed me how to play a little bit different boogie stuff.”
So then it’s time to hear from verbal boogie stuff, as well as rhythm and beat lyrics from you, our great readers. Keeping a clear ear out for those words in your song suggestions, whether that’s pop, indie, rock, blues, classical, dance, folk, punk, hip hop or anything else, I’m delighted to welcome back this week’s guest, the excellent AmyLee! Place your songs in comments below for deadline on Monday 11pm UK time, for playlists published on Wednesday. I’m sure it’ll be a big wide wonderland. So to start things off, perhaps the most obvious song was already chosen for a previous topic, songs that trigger dancing, but let’s get into its rhythm anyway, for inspiration.
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