Marshall - Birthplace of Boogie Woogie

The Marshall claim rests on recent research. Dr. John Tennison, a San Antonio psychiatrist and musicologist, published findings in 2004 that boogie woogie emerged in the 1870s near the Texas and Pacific Railroad, which set up headquarters in Marshall in 1872. Texas Highways reports that Tennison calls a bass line named The Marshall one of the earliest boogie figures. He presented his research in Marshall in January 2010, when pianist Omar Sharriff, who grew up in town, played a homecoming concert. Sharriff died on January 8, 2012.

What the plaque says

Marshall - Birthplace of Boogie Woogie According to oral tradition and documented evidence, the Boogie Woogie musical genre, with its driving, iconic left-hand rhythm, originated in the area of Marshall, Harrison County, in the early 1870s. During that decade, Marshall became the headquarters of the Texas & Pacific Railway Company and a hub for railroad transportation of cotton, timber and passengers, creating employment for recently emancipated African American laborers. Many African Americans worked in logging camps cutting trees and loading logs for locomotives to haul to sawmills, and most logging camps had a piano in the barrel house to keep the workers entertained and in the camps at night. It was in these barrel houses of East Texas logging camps where the first Boogie Woogies were played as largely untrained piano players developed techniques to entertain working-class audiences under loud, chaotic and often dangerous conditions. The driving left-hand bass patterns that are uniquely characteristic of Boogie Woogie piano, so highly suggestive of a steam locomotive chugging over iron rails, clearly are inspired and influenced by the sounds of the logging camp and the rail yard. Itinerant piano players rode the rails, often performing in exchange for free rides, and the music traveled with them, first to red-light districts of Texarkana and Shreveport, followed by Houston and New Orleans, then gradually reaching African American neighborhoods in St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago. Brothers George and Hersal Thomas were among the first to publish sheet music for Boogie Woogie, which they said they first heard in East Texas. Boogie Woogie masters Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, Floyd Dixon and Dave Alexander (Omar Sharriff) grew up in the Marshall area. An East Texas original, Boogie Woogie may still be found in many genres of music today. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — steps away
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 0.4 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 14 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.

More markers nearby

• Marshall, C.S.A. — steps away
• Governor Edward Clark — steps away
• Walter Paye Lane — steps away
• John T. Mills — steps away