A style of piano-based blues that became very popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and was extended from piano, to three pianos at once, guitar, big band, and country and western music and even gospel. While the blues traditionally depicts sadness and sorrow, boogie-woogie is associated with dancing.

The origins of the term are not known, but the style probably developed out of the oil boom in Texas, Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta in the early 1900s. The boogie-woogie style was certainly already widespread by the 1920s in timber and turpentine camps and other job sites with large numbers of African American workers, as well as up north in the African American communities of cities like Chicago.

The first boogie woogie hit was Pinetop's Boogie Woogie by Pinetop Smith, released in 1929. Other artists at that time included Meade Lux Lewis.

The boogie-woogie fad lasted from the late 1930s into the early 1950s and made a major contribution to the development of jump blues and ultimately to rock and roll, as epitomised by Jerry Lee Lewis.

In the 1960s, blues-oriented bands such as Canned Heat performed a style of loping, repetitive blues jamming they called boogie after the John Lee Hooker style, as in his Boogie Chillen, though the relationship to boogie woogie is more in spirit than in formal musical style.

Other significant artists include Fats Domino, Pete Johnson, Professor Longhair, Little Milton, Pinetop Perkins, Dr. John and Jimmy Yancey.

In the late 20th and early 21st century, Jools Holland has been instrumental in keeping the boogie-woogie tradition alive and boogie-woogie is still to be heard in clubs and on records throughout Europe and North America.