25

25
he could tap time and a microphone to pick up the tapping, "Boggie Chillen" was made.

It is a song about a young man coming of age in the city, breaking with his parents, and it mentions some of the favorite locales - Hastings Street, Henry's club - where that young man might want to go. "Boogie Chillen" got a boost from Gene Nobles, an R & B disc jockey on WLAC, a clear channel station that reached from Nashville into 15 states and Canada and Greenland. One night, Nobles played it ten times in a row. Here is:

Boogie Chillen 1.29

Country music played a role in rock 'n' roll's formation too. In 1945, a white guitar player from Clinton, South Carolina, who twice in the '40s was named Ebony magazine's guitarist of the year, released a record which became a # 8 hit on the country charts and a # 25 pop hit. Influenced by Django Reinhardt, Arthur Smith was stationed at a Naval base in Bainbridge, Maryland, near Washington, DC, during World War II. He commuted to Washington to work as a session musician for a record company begun by Irving Feld, owner of the Super Drug Store on Seventh street in black Washington. Feld had begun a record company, Super Disc, to service his black customers, and Smith backed up gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and jazz pianist Errol Garner on Feld's records. Feld sold masters to the MGM Record Company, established in 1947, when the new company was looking for material in the middle of the musician's union 1948 strike. One song was "Guitar Boogie:, and it influenced