"Roll 'Em Pete" by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson

"It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it" -- in Chuck Berry's classic song "Rock and Roll Music", that's the only line that actually talks about what the music is. The backbeat is, to all intents and purposes , the thing that differentiates early rock and roll from the music that preceded it. And like all of early rock and roll, it's something that had predecessors in rock's pre-history. Here we look at one of the first records claimed to have a backbeat, and at boogie woogie, hokum music, and a booglie wooglie piggy.