Boogie-Woogie

Boogie-woogie is a piano blues style built on a driving, repetitive left-hand bass figure — the rolling eight-to-the-bar ostinato — beneath improvised right-hand riffs and blues choruses. It crystallised in the barrelhouses and rent parties of the American South and Chicago in the 1920s, in the playing of *Pine Top Smith*, *Meade Lux Lewis*, *Albert Ammons* and *Pete Johnson*, and became a national popular craze in the late 1930s. Its patterns passed directly into rhythm and blues and rock and roll, and its two-piano and small-band arrangements remain a foundation of blues piano playing.