Barrelhouse Blues
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Barrelhouse Blues is rough, percussive piano blues for noisy work camps, saloons, turpentine camps, logging towns, brothels, and dance rooms. Its sound is loud, physical, and functional: stomping bass, repeated riffs, ragged timing, shouted vocals, hammered chords, and enough rhythmic muscle to cut through a room where subtlety had already lost the bar fight.
History
Barrelhouse predates many blues records and overlaps with ragtime, early jazz, boogie-woogie, and honky-tonk piano. Players such as Cow Cow Davenport, Speckled Red, Montana Taylor, Roosevelt Sykes, Cripple Clarence Lofton, and Little Brother Montgomery carried the style from informal entertainment spaces into recording studios and later folklore collections. Barrelhouse Blues fed boogie-woogie, Chicago piano blues, jump blues, and rock and roll's hard-driving piano approach.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Peter J. Silvester, A Left Hand Like God
- Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues
- Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began
- AllMusic