A comfortable case of Boogie fever

As I understand it, Stevie Wonder came into a place called the Square Club in Braddock one night and asked to sit in with the Precisions, a singing group put together by Homewood’s Boogie Dunn.

The Precisions were on break, but somebody said to Boogie, “Guess who just came in — Stevie Wonder.”

Going on half a century later, Darryl “Boogie” Dunn is telling me this at his dining room table in Wilkinsburg. So what did Boogie say?

“I said ‘Oh go on, don’t be starting that foolishness,’” he laughed. “Then we were back onstage, and I see him coming out of the bathroom. He sent his brother Calvin up to the stage to say Stevie wants to know, ‘Can he sit in with you?’ What was I gonna say?

“The band was all nervous, wondering what they were gonna play. I turned to them and said, ‘You been tellin’ me how great you are, now just play what Stevie tells you to play.’ “

So Stevie Wonder played drums that night in Braddock in 1972, and it’s no wonder Mr. Dunn is still talking about it after all these years. There can’t be a better way to celebrate Black Music Month than to absorb some of its granular Pittsburgh history, and for that, Boogie is most certifiably your guy.

Surely it wasn’t out of any cultural crisis that President Jimmy Carter designated June as Black Music Month in 1979, nor had the nation’s appreciation exactly lapsed when President Barack Obama rededicated it as AfricanAmerican Music Appreciation Month 10 years ago, but if you need a tip on how to appreciate this essential musical canon, I’ve got one.

Wake up.

That’s all you need do. Wake up, walk around, maintain consciousness, breathe in the audio culture, because most of American music either is or has roots in or has been adapted from black music. There are hundreds of ways to engage with it this month or any month, particularly its rich Pittsburgh impulses, but few are more fun than a long conversation with “Boogie” Dunn.

The founding producer of two Pittsburgh R&B groups in the ‘70s (the Precisions and the Eighth Wonder), Dunn’s got the oral history of Stevie Wonder in Braddock, the oral history of the night Boogie sang with the Junior LaRells at a record hop at East Liberty’s Westray Plaza, the night that featured a band from the Hill District fueled by some singer/guitarist named George Benson, or the night the Supremes performed at the same venue three years before their first top 10 record, “Where Did Our Love Go”?

Boogie’s got all of those stories, but the best one probably is his own, starting when he moved here

from Cincinnati with his mom and his siblings to the house his grandparents had just bought in Homewood in 1953.

He was only about 12 when he put together the singing group that became the Junior LaRells for a talent show at the Wilkinsburg Library, but after some early success, his mom yanked him hard back toward education.

“She’s regretted it to this day,” Dunn said. “Because back then, entertainers were getting a bad rap. People thought when you say entertainers, they thought drugs and all that. She’s 93 now, and she told me later in life she saw that with my love for music, what she should have done was what Michael Jackson’s parents did. When you see a child that’s interested that much, you have to get behind them and hone their skills.”

Boogie was back into music with both feet by the ‘70s, getting a firstperson perspective on the great transition within R&B away from vocalists as the focal point of the performance to a more band-driven product, beginning with Sly and the Family Stone, by his reckoning.

After leading two such entities into the late ‘70s, he started picking up gigs as a DJ, where he not only gained his name, a shortened form of what audiences called him — “Boogie Machine” — but discovered something of a life-altering premise.

“When you have a band, you have different personalities, and you have to deal with all of it and it never ends, guys not wanting to show up for rehearsal, all of that,” he said. “So I saw what I was getting for these DJ gigs and the light went on. I’m playin’ records and I’m gettin’ all this money, and I don’t have to deal with the personality of these records. It’s time for me to move on.”

So Boogie did that for the next 25 years while he worked toward retirement from Westinghouse, but his interest in the genre never waned. At 73, his mind for music goes far beyond the typical Pittsburgh hagiology of Blakey and Eckstein, Garner and Harper, Jamal and Hines, Strayhorn and Humphries and Khalifa. He still loves to talk about Betty Mabry, aka Betty Davis, the wayahead-of-her-time funkmistress from Homestead who wound up marrying and altering the career arc of Miles Davis, and talking with Boogie about any black artist over the past century triggers a story or three.

Boogie Dunn is a Pittsburgh treasure. We needn’t wait until June to remember it.