Abie "Boogaloo Ames" (died in 2002)
and Eden Brent 
Major Works and Awards
- Mississippi Governor's Award for Artist's Achievement Award Winner (2001)
- Recipient of Mississippi Folk Heritage Fellowship (2000)
- From Mississippi to Chicago (compilation of various artists, including Ames)
Hear and see Boogaloo Ames and Eden Brent at the Starkville Arts Festival in two short video clips.
Video 1
Video 2
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Abie "Boogaloo" Ames: A Biography
Abie "Boogaloo" Ames, who died at the age of eighty-one in February
of 2002 in Greenville, Mississippi, was a master
of the boogie-woogie piano style. Born in rural
Georgia, he taught himself to play the piano by listening to
songs on the radio and playing with them. When he was
fourteen, his family moved to Detroit, where he played gigs
regularly in the 1940's at local clubs. He eventually
led a popular local band in Detroit. He also worked as
a session player in the Motown Studios when Motown was just
beginning.
In the 1960's Boogaloo returned to the South where he still
lives today in Greenville. He began teaching Eden Brent,
a young resident of Greenville, in the 1980's . They eventually
began playing together and continued this partnership which
was the focus of a 1999 award-winning documentary by Mississippi
Educational Television called Boogaloo and Eden:Sustaining
the Sound.
 Abie
"Boogaloo" Ames was named the 2001 Artist's Achievement Award
Winner of the Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts in
the state of Mississippi. He was also a recipient of a
Folk Art Fellowship from the Mississippi Heritage Commission
and an Apprenticeship in 1993. He played many blues festivals
and was a living library of jazz and blues songs.
His photo appeared in a book called American Music.
He and his partner Eden Brent performed on July 27, 2000 at
the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage in Washington, D. C. on
Mississippi Day.
His piano playing style earned him his nickname "Boogaloo"
in the 1940's. The team of Ames and Brent performed not
only at Kennedy Center but at the Waldorf Astoria in New
York and the Republican National Convention. Boogaloo
and Eden, a half hour documentary produced before
Ames' death by Mississippi Educational TV, is about the musical
and personal relationships between Eden Brent, a thirty-something
year old white female, and her teacher and partner, 81 year
old Boogaloo Ames.
At the time of his death, Boogaloo was working on a CD
with Mississippi jazz sensation Cassandra Wilson in a Clarksdale
recording studio to produce Belly of the Sun, for
which Ames wrote a song entitled Darkness in the Delta.
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Related Websites
Kennedy
Center Millennium Stage Performance Archive of Abie "Boogaloo"
Ames and Eden Brent on July 27, 2000, Mississippi
State Day. The video/audio performance is an excellent
performance and about 30 minutes.
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More photos from the April 29, 2001, performance
by Abie "Boogaloo" Ames and Eden Brent in Starkville, Mississippi.
 
 
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