"Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" is a blues song initially recorded by Clarence "Pinetop" Smith on December 29, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, and released by Vocalion Records on March 1, 1929.
[1] This recording was made in 1928, and its lyrics are exclusively instructions to dancers in the audience, as was traditional at the time.
Musically, it is strikingly similar to the previous year's hit, "Honky Tonk Train Blues", by Meade Lux Lewis,[2] which like "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" went on to become a standard recorded many times by many artists.
This may not be a coincidence, as around that time Lewis and Smith lived in the same boarding house.
Other versions were recorded by: Blind Willie McTell (1949), Louis Jordan (1950), Tommy Dorsey (1938), Lionel Hampton (1946) — a rare version that actually included Pinetop's original instructions, Meade Lux Lewis (1951) — ironic given his influence on Pinetop's original version 23 years earlier, plus a version by Memphis Slim, backed by Willie Dixon, and Armand "Jump" Jackson,[3] where the announcer credited Pinetop as "the creator of rock and roll" (1962).