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The piano at the Diboll lumber camp didn’t have all its keys. Nobody cared. When W.J. “Professor” Jackson sat down to play, whatever keys it had were enough.
The barrel house trail of Angelina County ran south from Lufkin to Diboll and beyond, following the timber stands that made the East Texas Piney Woods one of the most heavily logged regions in the country from the 1870s through the early 1900s. The lumber companies built barrel houses — makeshift dance halls attached to camp stores — to keep their workers from wandering into town on weekends and never coming back. They stocked the barrel houses with whiskey barrels and upright pianos and hired whoever could play. What they got, in exchange for controlling their workforce, was the incubator for boogie woogie.
W.J. “Professor” Jackson was the Diboll area’s own piano legend. Born around 1870, he died in 1972 at 102 years old, playing piano until the end. He played trumpet in circus bands, which is how he met a boy from Beaumont named Harry James — and taught the future big band superstar to play jazz trumpet. Jackson’s files are kept at The History Center in Diboll, the archive of the Arthur Temple lumber family and the best repository of Piney Woods music history outside of a university. Exhibits document the barrel house era through photographs, recordings, and artifacts: the crosscut saws, the camp stores, the scrip currency that kept workers from ever getting ahead.
The itinerant pianists who worked these camps traveled the lumber railroad spur lines — not the main lines, but the narrow-gauge spurs that ran back into the timber. They played one camp Friday, another Saturday, a third Sunday if they had the stamina. The style they were developing — eight-beat bass lines that mimicked the rhythm of steam engines, pounding left hands that kept the whole room moving — was being called “Fast Western” and “Fast Texas” before it acquired the name boogie woogie in 1929. It was the same style playing in Harrison County’s barrelhouses fifty miles to the north, the same music in the Swampoodle District in Texarkana at the top of the corridor.
The History Center is still open in Diboll. The barrel houses are long gone — torn down, burned, collapsed back into the forest. But the bass figure is everywhere. Every time you hear a walking left hand in a rock ’n’ roll record, you’re hearing what they played in those sheds in the pines.