Lewis, Meade

byname Lux

(born 1905, Louisville, Ky., U.S.—died June 7, 1964, Minneapolis, Minn.) U.S. musician and one of the leading exponents of boogie-woogie piano.

A former violin student who moved to piano playing in Chicago nightclubs, he owed his belated fame to a single record made in 1929 and unearthed seven years later: his “Honky Tonk Train Blues.” One of the most vibrant and exhilarating of all boogie-woogie expositions, it had a great deal to do with the feverish if transient craze for the idiom in the late 1930s. He re-recorded the theme on at least four occasions. He also appeared with Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons as part of a famous six-handed piano team. He spent the last 20 years of his career as he had begun it, playing piano in nightclubs. His style, with its hypnotically insistent right-hand figures and its powerful, mechanistic left-hand rhythms, had enormous impact on the idiom.