quote:
On 29 December 1928 he recorded his influential "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie," one of the first "boogie woogie" style recordings to make a hit, and which cemented the name for the style. Pine Top talks over the recording, telling how to dance to the number. He said he originated the number at a house-rent party in St. Louis, Missouri. Smith was the first ever to direct "the girl with the red dress on" to "not move a peg" until told to "shake that thing" and "mess around".

Smith was scheduled to make another recording session for Vocalion in 1929, but died from a gunshot wound in a dance-hall fight in Chicago the day before the session. Sources differ as to whether he was the intended recipient of the bullet. "I saw Pinetop spit blood" was the famous headline in Down Beat magazine.

No photographs of Smith are known to exist.

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Posted by Kafka

I am the moral conscience of TD

Member since Jul 2007

143037 posts

Posted on 9/17/12 at 4:35 pm to Kafka

Al Dexter - "Pistol Packin' Mama" (1943)

"Pistol Packin' Mama" is notable as one of the first songs, after "You Are My Sunshine" had blazed the trail a couple of years earlier, to cross over from country music onto the pop charts. Bing Crosby's cover would go to #1 and sell over two million copies.

The song was so popular the Duke of Windsor was caught humming the tune in public, and Irving Berlin wrote in his score for Annie Get Your Gun: "But men don't buy pajamas, for pistol packin' mamas, oh you can't get a man with a gun...". Life magazine would eventually refer to the song as "a national earache".

It made a lot of people who'd never paid much attention to country music aware of the genre.

Al Dexter:

The song was so immensely popular it inspired a film the same year it was released:

A WWII airplane:

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