page_title: Boogie Chillen'
section_title: Composition and lyrics
hierarchical_section_title: Boogie Chillen' / Composition and lyrics
caption_attribution_description: Massey Hall, Toronto, Aug. 20, 1978 Photo by Jean-Luc Ourlin
context_page_description: "Boogie Chillen'" or "Boogie Chillun" is a blues song first recorded by John Lee Hooker in 1948. It is a solo performance featuring Hooker's vocal, electric guitar, and rhythmic foot stomps. The lyrics are partly autobiographical and alternate between spoken and sung verses. The song was his debut record release and in 1949, it became the first "down-home" electric blues song to reach number one in the R&B records chart.
  Hooker's song was part of a trend in the late 1940s to a new style of urban electric blues based on earlier Delta blues idioms. Although it is called a boogie, it resembles early North Mississippi Hill country blues rather than the boogie-woogie piano-derived style of the 1930s and 1940s. Hooker gave credit to his stepfather, Will Moore, who taught him the rhythm of "Boogie Chillen'" when he was a teenager. Some of the song's lyrics are derived from earlier blues songs.
  Hooker's guitar work on the song inspired several well-known guitarists to take up the instrument. With its driving style and focus on rhythm, it is also considered a forerunner of rock and roll.
context_section_description: "Boogie Chillen'" is described by music critic Bill Dahl as "blues as primitive as anything then on the market; Hooker's dark, ruminative vocals were backed only by his own ringing, heavily amplified guitar and insistently pounding foot".  In an interview, Hooker shared how he came up with "Boogie Chillen'":
  I wrote that song in Detroit when I was sittin' around strummin' my guitar.  The thing come into me, you know?  I heard [my stepfather] Will Moore done [sic] it years and years before.  I was a little kid from down South, and I heard him do a song like that, but he didn't call it 'Boogie Chillen.'  But it had that beat, and I just kept that beat up and I called it 'Boogie Chillen.'
  He performed the song in clubs before recording it and called it "Boogie Woogie" before settling on "Boogie Chillen'".  According to musicologist Robert Palmer, "The closest thing to it on records is 'Cottonfield Blues', recorded by Garfield Akers and Joe Callicott, two guitarists from the hill country of northern Mississippi, in 1929.  Essentially, it was a backcountry, pre-blues sort of music—a droning, open-ended stomp without a fixed verse form that lent itself to building up to a cumulative, trancelike effect".
  Hooker's vocal alternates between sung and spoken sections.  Commenting on Hooker's vocal sections, music historian Ted Gioia notes, "The song has almost no melody.  Even less harmony.  In fact, it is hard to call it a song.  It's more like a bit of jive stream of consciousness in 4/4 time."  Some of the lyrics are borrowed from earlier songs that date back to the beginning of the blues.  The opening line "My mama she didn't allow me to stay out all night long" has origins in "Mama Don't Allow", an old dance song.  Several songs were recorded in the 1920s with similar titles. "Boogie No. 3" by boogie-woogie pianist Cow Cow Davenport has sung and spoken sections and includes the lines, "I don't care what Grandma don't allow, play my music anyhow, Grandma's don't 'llow no music playin' in here". Hooker's first and second takes of the song include similar verses and the narrative about Henry's Swing Club, but do not include the crucial mid-song hook "Boogie, chillen'!" before the guitar break, which gives the song its lyrical identity.
  A key feature of the song is the driving guitar rhythmic figure centered on one chord, with "accents that fell fractionally ahead of the beat".  Music journalist Charles Shaar Murray describes it as a "rocking dance piece ... its structure is utterly free-form, its basic beat is the jumping, polyrhythmic groove which he [Hooker] learned in the Delta".  In an interview with B.B. King, Hooker confirmed that he used an open G guitar tuning technique for his guitar, although he usually used a capo, raising the pitch to B (1948), A♭ (1959), or A (1970).  He also employed hammer-on and pull-off techniques, which are described as "a slurred ascending bass line played on the fifth string [tonic]" by music writer Lenny Carlson.  Although it is titled a "boogie", it does not resemble the earlier boogie-woogie style.  Boogie-woogie is based on a left-hand piano ostinato or walking-bass line and, as performed on guitar, forms the popular 1940s instrumental "Guitar Boogie".  Rather than being derivative, Hooker's boogie becomes "as overwhelmingly personal a piece as anything ever done in the blues".
caption: Hooker performing in 1972
exif: {}