Johnny Barfield

Last updated April 12, 2019

John Alexander Barfield (3 March 1909 - 16 January 1974) was an American country and old-time music performer, best known for his 1939 recording of "Boogie Woogie", the first country boogie.

The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.

Country music, also known as country and western, and hillbilly music, is a genre of popular music that originated in the southern United States in the early 1920s. It takes its roots from genres such as folk music and blues.

Old-time music is a genre of North American folk music. It developed along with various North American folk dances, such as square dancing, clogging, and buck dancing. It is played on acoustic instruments, generally centering on a combination of fiddle and plucked string instruments, as well as the mandolin.

He was born in Tifton, Georgia, and in his youth played guitar on street corners with his brother Coot. They recorded for Columbia Records in Atlanta in 1927, but the recordings were not released. Soon afterwards, Johnny Barfield became acquainted with Clayton McMichen and Bert Layne of the Skillet Lickers, touring with the group and recording with some of its offshoots, including McMichen's group, the Georgia Wildcats. By 1932 he was performing both solo, and as a member of Layne's band. In 1939, he won a recording contract with Bluebird Records, and released his version of "Boogie Woogie", a song derived from "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" recorded in 1928 by Pinetop Smith. Barfield's song is considered the first country boogie, and became popular on jukeboxes.^[1]^[2]

Tifton, Georgia City in Georgia, United States

Tifton is a city in Tift County, Georgia, United States. The population was 16,869 at the 2010 census. The city is the county seat of Tift County.

Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. It was founded in 1887, evolving from the American Graphophone Company, the successor to the Volta Graphophone Company. Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in the recorded sound business, and the second major company to produce records. From 1961 to 1990, Columbia recordings were released outside North America under the name CBS Records to avoid confusion with EMI's Columbia Graphophone Company. Columbia is one of Sony Music's four flagship record labels, alongside former longtime rival RCA Records, as well as Arista Records and Epic Records.

Atlanta is the capital of, and the most populous city in, the U.S. state of Georgia. With an estimated 2017 population of 486,290, it is also the 38th most-populous city in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, home to 5.8 million people and the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the nation. Atlanta is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia. A small portion of the city extends eastward into neighboring DeKalb County.

Barfield recorded again in 1940 and 1941, but failed to repeat his earlier success. He continued to perform for several years. He died in 1974, aged 64.

Related Research Articles

Boogie-woogie is a music genre that became popular during the late 1920s, developed in African-American communities in the 1870s. It was eventually extended from piano, to piano duo and trio, guitar, big band, country and western music, and gospel. While the blues traditionally expresses a variety of emotions, boogie-woogie is mainly associated with dancing. The lyrics of one of the earliest hits, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie", consist entirely of instructions to dancers:

Now, when I tell you to hold yourself, don't you move a peg.
And when I tell you to get it, I want you to Boogie Woogie!

Frederick Charles Slack was an American swing and boogie-woogie pianist and bandleader.

Pete Johnson was an American boogie-woogie and jazz pianist.

Clarence Smith, better known as Pinetop Smith or Pine Top Smith, was an American boogie-woogie style blues pianist. His hit tune "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie" featured rhythmic "breaks" that were an essential ingredient of ragtime music, but also a fundamental foreshadowing of rock & roll. The song was also the first known use of the term "boogie woogie" on a record, and cemented that term as the moniker for the genre.

Rock and roll emerged as a defined musical style in the United States in the early to mid-1950s. It derived most directly from the rhythm and blues music of the 1940s, which itself developed from earlier blues, boogie woogie, jazz and swing music, and was also influenced by gospel, country and western, and traditional folk music. Rock and roll in turn provided the main basis for the music that, since the mid-1960s, has been generally known simply as rock music.

Riley Puckett was an American country music pioneer, best known as a member of Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers.

Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins was an American blues pianist. He played with some of the most influential blues and rock-and-roll performers of his time and received numerous honors, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Blues Hall of Fame.

Boogie is a repetitive, swung note or shuffle rhythm, "groove" or pattern used in blues which was originally played on the piano in boogie-woogie music. The characteristic rhythm and feel of the boogie was then adapted to guitar, double bass, and other instruments. The earliest recorded boogie-woogie song was in 1916. By the 1930s, Swing bands such as Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Louis Jordan all had boogie hits. By the 1950s, boogie became incorporated into the emerging rockabilly and rock and roll styles. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s country bands released country boogies. Today, the term "boogie" usually refers to dancing to pop, disco, or rock music.

Axel Zwingenberger is a German blues and boogie-woogie pianist and songwriter.

Johnny Nicholas is an American blues musician. He is most noted for being a member of the Grammy Award winning group, Asleep at the Wheel.

"Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" is a song initially recorded on December 29, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It was released on March 1, 1929 by Clarence "Pinetop" Smith on Vocalion Records, a piano rag that cemented boogie-woogie as the name of its entire genre, which eventually evolved into rock and roll. Along with "Crazy About My Baby", "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" is sometimes cited as "the first rock and roll song", being an early instance of a danceable 12 bar blues with backbeat.

James Louis Blythe was an American jazz and boogie-woogie pianist and composer. Blythe is known to have recorded as many as 300 piano rolls, and his song "Chicago Stomp" is considered one of the earliest examples of boogie-woogie music to be recorded.

The Skillet Lickers were an old-time band from Georgia, United States.

Clayton McMichen was an American fiddler and country musician.

Steve "Big Man" Clayton, is a British boogie-woogie piano player, singer and songwriter.

William Ezell, was an American blues, jazz, ragtime and boogie-woogie pianist and occasional singer, who was also billed as Will Ezell. He regularly contributed to recordings made by Paramount Records in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Ezell was noted by the music journalist Bruce Eder as "a technically brilliant pianist, showing the strong influence of jazz as well as blues in his work".

Aaron "Pinetop" Sparks was an American blues pianist active in St. Louis in the early 1930s. He died in his twenties from either poisoning or exhaustion.

"Boo-Woo" is the A-side of the 78-rpm jazz instrumental single recorded on February 1, 1939 by Harry James and The Boogie Woogie Trio.

<i>Boogie Woogie</i> (album) 1941 compilation album by Harry James, Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis

Boogie Woogie is a compilation album containing four 10-inch, 78 rpm records of Boogie-woogie music. The songs on the album were recorded over a period of three years from 1936 to 1939, then released in 1941 on this compilation album by Columbia Records (C44). Artists featured on the album include Harry James, Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, and the three prominent boogie-woogie pianists of the time, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis.

"Crazy About My Baby" is a boogie woogie song, first recorded by Blind Roosevelt Graves in 1929. It was perhaps the first recorded to contain all elements of what would come to be called rock and roll, and has been described as the first song of that genre.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Johnny Barfield at Allmusic.com

[rocky-2] Johnny Barfield at Rocky Productions