ROLL 'EM PETE
Created on 10/02/2002Latest update on 13/04/2024
Artist: Joe Turner & Pete Johnson
Author: Pete Johnson/Joe Turner
Label: Vocalion
Year: 1938
B-side of Goin' Away Blues, Big Joe Turner's debut, featuring boogie woogie piano player Pete Johnson. They met in Kansas City in 1933. Five years later John Hammond Sr. invited them to join his Spirituals To Swing package in Carnegie Hall, New York. Pete Johnson might have recorded a similar tune four months earlier (without vocals) as Climbin' And Screamin'. Anyhow, boogie woogie became the talk of the town some ten years after its conception (see: Pinetop's Boogie Woogie). This success came at the right moment: in birthplace Kansas City a new mayor had just padlocked all the barrelhouses. In 1952 Pete lost a finger in an accident, and his boogie woogie piano playing skills to boot.
Covers:
- 1939:
- 1944:
- 1945:
T-Bone Walker [in T-Bone Boogie]
- 1947:
Amos Milburn [in Bye Bye Boogie]
- 1958:
Big Joe Turner [as Jump For Joy, his last hit for Atlantic, with King Curtis; not to be confused with Duke Ellington's ('41 - Victor)]
- 1959:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1973:
Chuck Berry [also elements in his Bye Bye Johnny (see there)]
- 1981:
Rocket 88 [with Charlie Watts]
- 1982:
- 1997:
Jools Holland [as Jump For Joy, crediting Pete Johnson]
- 2000:
- 2004:
- 2007:
