Artist	Song
Pinetop Smith	Pinetop's Boogie Woogie (1928)
Will Ezell	Pitchin' Boogie (1929)
Cannon's Jug Stompers	Walk Right In (1929)
Speckled Red	The Dirty Dozen (1930)
Tampa Red	Boogie Woogie Dance (1931)
Big Bill Broonzy	How You Want It Done (1932)
Jabo Williams	Fat Mama Blues (1932)
Leroy Carr	Barrelhouse Woman (1934)
The Delmore Brothers	Brown's Ferry Blues (1934)
Leadbelly	Midnight Special (1934)
Cripple Clarence Lofton & Red Nelson	Strut That Thing (I Don't Know) (1935)
Roosevelt Sykes	The Honeydripper (1936)
Casey Bill Weldon	Back Door Blues (1936)
Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson	Roll 'Em Pete (1938)
Claude Casey & His Pine State Playboys	Pine State Honky Tonk (1938)
Buddy Jones	Rockin' Rollin' Mama (1939)
Big Bill Broonzy	Trucking Little Woman (1939)
Harry James & Albert Ammons	Woo Woo (1939)
Tampa Red	Don't You Lie To Me (1940)
Blind Boy Fuller	Set It Up And Go (1940)
Ted Daffan's Texans	Blue Steel Blues (1941)
Big Bill Broonzy	All By Myself (1941)
Tampa Red & Big Maceo	Let Me Play With Your Poodle (1942)
Sister Rosetta Tharpe	Strange Things Happening Everyday (1944)
Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup	Who's Been Fooling You (1944)
Arthur Smith	Guitar Boogie (1945)
T-Bone Walker	T-Bone Boogie (1945)
Helen Humes	Be Baba Leba (1945)

Comment:

Well... you didn't think I'd start in the 1950's did you?!! I'd always realised that the story about Rock n Roll being invented in the mid-Fifties was a lie... but it was only when I started listening to a lot of old Boogie Woogie recordings a few years ago that I first realised just how big a lie! Forget about Elvis Presley, Bill Haley or even Chuck Berry being the fathers of Rock n Roll... they were its grand-children! As far as I'm concerned the people who created the blueprint for Rock n Roll were men like Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Pinetop Smith - whose "Pinetop Boogie Woogie" from 1928 was arguably the first ever Rock n Roll record! ...And so this mix is an attempt to trace a path from Rock n Roll's early Boogie Woogie roots through to some of the more 'traditional' contenders for the title of first ever Rock n Roll record: "Guitar Boogie" and "Be Baba Leba". Along the way it's a mixture of piano boogie, guitar blues, country, western swing and even gospel. I've avoided the 'big band boogie' of artists like Count Basie or Lionel Hampton which dominate a lot of boogie (and 'Roots of Rock n Roll')compilations since I felt that the solo artists and small combos have a raw energy which is more in keeping with the Rock n Roll spirit than a huge orchestra. It never ceases to amaze me how ahead of their time a lot of these recordings sound: the third song on this mix "Walk Right In" made it to Number One in the charts 34 years later (courtesy of a cover by The Rooftop Singers); "Fat Mama Blues" would have sounded contemporary if Fats Domino had released it twenty years later; and Big Joe Turner's "Roll 'Em Pete" is as much a Rock n Roll song as anything he recorded in the Fifties. One of the most surprising 'discoveries' I made whilst putting this CD together was the proto-rocakabilly record "Rockin' Rollin' Mama" (featuring the lyrics "Rockin' rollin' mama I love the way you rock 'n' roll...") which seems to make a mockery of the history books with its recording date of 1939! It probably goes without saying that there is a sequel to this mix!

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