Friday, March 29, 2024

History and Performance of Boogie Woogie at Allen Public Library

Among its more unusual bragging rights, Texas can lay claim to being the birthplace of Boogie Woogie music.  At 7:30 pm Friday, August 28, Boogie Woogie fans can learn more about the origins of this Lone Star State music phenomenon at the Allen Public Library.

Fasten your seat belt when John Tennison and Sugar Boy Myers take the stage to lay down high-energy Boogie Woogie grooves. Tennison performs Boogie Woogie on piano and will be accompanied by Sugar Boy Myers on drums. Sugar Boy played for the Freddie King band and accompanied Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and other iconic legends.

Logging camps were located throughout the piney woods of East Texas and piano players moved from one camp to another. On a recent National Public Radio interview, Texas native musician and musicologist John Tennison explains that piano players moved on board the Texas and Pacific Railroad.  Tennison states, “Marshall, Texas, was the exact place and very real location where Boogie Woogie first came into existence, largely due to the town’s location as an important railroad center in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oral histories indicate Boogie Woogie was first played in the 1870s.”

After World War One, Lead Belly played music with a Boogie Woogie bass line.  The American public started to take notice of this musical genre during various Carnegie Hall concerts in the 1920s, and in the 1940s, Glenn Miller, Andrew Sisters and Tommy Dorsey introduced Boogie Woogie to a new generation. Boogie Woogie later influenced a huge number of blues and rock musicians such as Chuck Berry. U.S. Highway 59, that runs across east Texas from Houston to Texarkana, is often referred to as the “Boogie Woogie” highway.

Tennison located one of the last original Boogie Woogie pianists Omar Shariff in 2010 and brought him back to Texas for two standing room only concerts in 2011.  Mr. Shariff died in 2012.

The library is located at 300 N. Allen Dr.  Call 214-509-4911 got more information.

 

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