Boogie Woogie with Bob Seeley
Reported by Erik Smith
Web produced by Christiana Ciolac

Bob Seeley's fingers fly over the piano keys as he plays boogie woogie. Video

His hands travel at the speed of sound, his fingers almost at the speed of light, touching down briefly to stroke an ivory or ebony key before speeding on to another.

"I like to play boogie woogie," Bob Seeley says. "I like to play it fast and loud and furious."

In milliseconds, the flying fingers create a rhapsody in rhythm and cascading notes that instantly separate the basics of Beethoven from the barrel house of boogie woogie.

"Classic boogie woogie comes out of the blues," Seeley says. "Blues is, generally speaking, slow, but boogie woogie is usually much more up-tempo. I call it happy blues."

Bob Seeley

It is the music of the jazz age and the juke joint, a bawdy, rollicking excursion into our yellow-paged past, drenched in the aroma of cheap whiskey, steal cigars and dime store perfumes. This is boogie, and Bob Seeley is its acknowledged master.

"I really got into it, a friend of mine is a banjo player," he says. "This is a time when sing-along music was very popular in the bars. He said, 'My piano player just quit.'"

"I was just about unemployed at that time," Seeley continues. "I said, 'Okay, I need a few bucks to get out to California, you know.'"

"So I went and played with him, and we had such a ball that I'm still doing it," Seeley says with a smile.

He never ended up moving to California.

Almost three-quarters of a century behind its heyday, Seeley is still keeping the heart and soul of boogie alive.

Bob Seeley still plays in the Detroit area.

It is the rhythm of his life, its long history literally held in his hands. Whether in a European concert hall, a New York jazz festival or in a piano bar in Troy where he has played forever, the music of the forgotten masters is made fresh again. It is made young again, racing through the veins, sprinting over the keys, leaping across the generations.

"It's not a business, I don't think, where you can go in, try to make a big killing, you know," Seeley says. "But it's a passion. That's it exactly. It's in your bones. I mean, if you are a musician, and everybody else that does it, it's passion."

Like so many others who choose to labor in the opaque shadows beyond music mainstream, Seeley's talents have gone largely unheralded. He's had no big-time record contracts, no dates on "The Tonight Show."

But there's another trip to Europe next month where boogie woogie hasn't been forgotten and where the faithful will gather again in tribute to a true master of American music.

Click to find out more about Bob Seeley and boogie woogie music.

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