[Ads-l] "boogie-joogie"

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> HDAS: 1957, citing St. Louisan Herbert Simmons. The earliest cite that
> I've found of it is as the title of a jam by Tab Smith, another St. Louisan.


I apologize for somehow managing to fxck this up.

IAC, my intention is to provide yet another of my useless historical notes.
Ca. 1946, Jesse "Spider" Burke became the first black DJ in Saint Louis and
in Missouri, as well as one of the first in the entire United States. The
earliest dated mention of him that I've found is in Billboard, Volume 61,
April 30, 1949, p.42, wherein he is cited as "Spider Burke, Saint Louis
Negro d. j." Spider was a *serious* aficionado of what was then called
"modern jazz," a genre that, according his patter, "took the ship out of
the bottle and made it stand for a brand-new sound!" OTOH, he felt nothing
but contempt for the music of that era - the equivalent of today's
hip-hop/rap - that was, in fact, actually *popular* among the local black
population's "younger set." This music had no name at all that I, as a
pre-teen, was aware of. Spider's program, the House of Joy Show, had sets
with the expected names: The Spider's Web, Spinning With Spider. But, when
the set featuring the popular sounds came on, he called it merely, "the
after-school swing session." He intro'ed it with the following patter:
"*Let's* take a *stroll down the alley*, behind my house, for *these* are
the *boogie-joogie* sounds!"

An StL "memories" site has, from April 6, 2015:

“Blues back in the alley behind my house…these are the Boogie-Joogie
sounds…” _an exact quote_

"Exact quote," my ass. An actual *book* claims that Spider had "an hourly
_late-night_ show on KXLW in Saint Louis." KXLW had only a "daylight"
license. It transmitted from sunup to sundown. As Abraham Lincoln says,
"Don't believe everything that you find on the Web!"

The take-away is that "boogie-joogie" was always only an adjective specific
to the kind of music popular in the 'hood from ca. 1940 to ca. 1960 and
which was meant to disparage that music. And, in The Lou, its use was
specific to Spider Burke. It was never a term of general circulation.
Professionals in this field may be able to find this term in the wild,
elsewhere. But my hour's worth of "research" finds it to be used in print
very rarely and only by people who lived in St. Louis when I did and who
didn't use it as another word for "boogie-woogie" or as anything but an
adjective.



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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