Boogie-Woogie
A blues piano style with a continuous, rolling eighth-note bass figure.
What it means
Boogie-woogie is a blues piano style in which the left hand plays a relentlessly repeated, usually eighth-note-based accompaniment pattern over the twelve-bar blues progression, while the right hand improvises freely above it. This driving ostinato bass gives the style its rolling, danceable character.
The style likely emerged around the turn of the twentieth century in the American Midwest and became popular in the 1920s and especially the 1930s through pianists such as Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons.
Musical use
Typical bass patterns include broken octaves, thirds, or eight-to-the-bar walking lines that follow the blues progression of tonic, subdominant, and dominant. Boogie-woogie strongly influenced early rock and roll and rhythm and blues, which absorbed many of its piano and bass patterns.
Boogie-woogie is distinguished from general blues piano playing by the left hand's fixed, continuously repeated pattern, rather than free accompaniment.