Essential Collection: Boogie Woogie Hits! (3-CD)

by Various Artists

Personnel: Bobby Lamm, Irene Daye, Anita O'Day (vocals); Larry Adler (harmonica); Tony Aless, Count Basie, Pete Johnson & His Boogie Woogie Boys , Tommy Linehan, Frankie Carle, Freddie Slack, Howard Smith , Jack Fina, Jack Gardner, Moe Wechsler, Jess Stacy, Johnny Guarnieri, Johnny Mercer, Albert Ammons, Meade "Lux" Lewis, Milt Raskin, Bob Zurke, Carmen Cavallaro, Earl Hines (piano).

When tempered with the knowledge that the music known as boogie woogie is known to have originated in Southern turpentine camps (those often brutally run, post-Emancipation forced labor institutions), the hyperkinetic cheer of the boogie-woogie craze that swept through U.S. pop culture during the 1940s and early '50s might lose just a bit of its sheen. This seldom-referenced background is hardly apparent throughout Dynamic Entertainment's 75-track anthology Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar: Boogie Woogie Hits. Certainly the inclusion of root strata classics by Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, and Albert Ammons brings the music on home, and the Afro-American jazz community is well represented by a contingent from New Orleans (Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, and Henry Red Allen) together with heroes of the Kansas City/Chicago/New York swing tradition (Count Basie, Jay McShann, Andy Kirk, Mary Lou Williams, Earl Hines, Erskine Hawkins, John Kirby, Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, Louis Jordan, and Nat King Cole). Most of the white folks on this collection had lucrative success with the boogie formula, however incidental to their overall act the "woogie" might in fact have been. They include bandleaders Larry Clinton, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, Gene Krupa, Bob Crosby, Tommy Dorsey, Freddy Martin, Stan Kenton, Ray Anthony, and Ray McKinley, as well as pianists Jess Stacy, Bob Zurke, Frankie Carle, Carmen Cavallero, and Freddie Slack, vocalists Will Bradley, Phil Harris, and the Andrews Sisters, harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler and Jerry Murad's Harmonicats. And that's not everybody who made it onto this entertaining collection! It's a shame that Jimmy Yancey, Charles "Cow Cow" Davenport, Big Maceo Merriweather, Roosevelt Sykes, and Clarence Pinetop Smith were not posthumously invited. After all, they practically invented boogie-woogie, along with certain nameless pianists who made a living playing for black laborers in Southern work camps many years ago. ~ arwulf arwulf