Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
classics.
Charles Davenport was born in Anniston, Alabama
in 1894, one ofeight children of a minister and a church
organist. He taught himself to play the organ and began
taking piano lessons at the age of 12. His religious
parents objected to his playing blues and ragtime. "So,
whenever I'd get a chance," he once told an interviewer,
"I would slip away from my home to practice on some
neighbor' s piano." He said his grandmother had always
told him that if he disobeyed his parents, "The boogie
man would get him." He began calling his piano music
"boogie music."
When Davenport was 16, his parents, fed up with his
interest in ragtime piano, sent him to the Alabama
Theological Seminary. He was promptly expelled for
playing ragtime or "boogie music."
He went to Birmingham and began playing for dancers
at honky tonk joints. When they began dancing to his
piano styles, he started calling his music boogie-woogie.
When he was 20, Davenport went to Atlanta and got
jobs playing piano at bars and brothels. Within several
years, he was touring the South with a carnival tent
show, playing in the Storyville section of New Orleans,
162
Freddie Slack
Probably the most popular boogie woogie piano
player of the 1930s and '40s, Freddie Slack, a native of
La Crosse, Wisconsin, came to Cleveland in 1935 to
play with the Ben Pollack Orchestra at the Mayfair
Casino, a plush nightclub in the Ohio Theatre Building
on Euclid Avenue. A year later, Slack left the Pollack
band and joined Jimmy Dorsey' s Orchestra which
included Cleveland trumpeter George Thow and
drummer Ray McKinley.
In 1939, McKinley teamed up with trombonist