For the class music scavenger hunt, I happened across a genre of music which saw massive popularity in the late 1930s up into the 1950’s: the Boogie Woogies.  This genre, I learned, is theorized to have begun in the late 1800s among communities of newly-emancipated slaves in the South, primarily in Texas.  I found that the Texas railways played an “instrumental” part in the spread of Boogie Woogie, as musicians would play on the trains in exchange for passage to the cities and urban centers of other states for which Boogie Woogie came to be known for.

A fast tempo dance music played on the piano, Boogie Woogie later grew to include other instruments and spoken instructions to dancers in the 20th century.  The first recording of the genre was in 1923, and the first widespread hit was 1928’s “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” in which Pinetop Perkins spoke instructions to the dancers for how to move during his Boogie Woogie.

This Boogie Woogie style grew dramatically in the late 1930s and quickly took over sections of the urban club and dance scene.  Then, around the turn of the 1940’s the swing style, which used primarily brass band bases, incorporated the Boogie Woogie style to even greater commercial success, and the two genres dominated the music scene of the 1940’s and early 1950’s.

While researching Boogie Woogie, I found that this genre was not covered before the first commercial success in 1928.  This is probably due to the nature of how Boogie Woogie spread, from rural areas to urban centers through the railroad.  Now, I do recognize that there are most likely experts on Boogie Woogie, but I believe that this relatively unknown quality of the genre was due to its prevalence in former slave populations combined with the more socially secluded areas of rural Texas.  The first actual mention of the phrase Boogie Woogy was in 1912 in The Abilene Weekly Reflector.  “The ‘boogy-woogy’ man is in Abilene.  He goes out only at night and is never seen during the day.  He… delights in annoying the women.”  This tells me something about the use of the term Boogie Woogie, at least before the genre became known, it was used to describe frightening, awkward, downright weird and shifty behavior.  Put this in contrast to the origins ascribed to the phrase Boogie Woogie, which are theorized to have originated from African words meaning “to move” and to “dance wildly, shake ones clothes off.”

To me this is interesting, because it goes back to our discussion of the different selves acceptable in society.  A term which stemmed from words calling for greatly impassioned dancing in one culture, but meaning queer and creepy behavior in another.  Also, how the society which used Boodie Woogie as negative then accepted the name as the new musical hit style, to me, that just means that societies look for new crazes constantly, even if, and apparently especially if, they previously meant something negative.