jump blues style, which emphasized ensemble instrumentation. Recent hit singles by Muddy Waters and Lightnin' Hopkins had also used this stripped-down, electrified Delta blues-inspired approach. Composition and lyrics "Boogie Chillen'" is described by music critic Bill Dahl as "blues as primitive as anything then on the market; Hooker's dark, ruminative vocals were backed only by his own ringing, heavily amplified guitar and insistently pounding foot". In an interview, Hooker shared how he came up with "Boogie Chillen'": He performed the song in clubs before recording it and called it "Boogie Woogie" before settling on "Boogie Chillen'". According to musicologist Robert Palmer, "The closest thing to it on records is 'Cottonfield Blues', recorded by Garfield Akers and Joe Callicott, two guitarists from the hill country of northern Mississippi, in 1929. Essentially, it was a backcountry, pre-blues sort of music—a droning, open-ended stomp without a fixed verse form that lent itself to building up to a cumulative, trancelike effect". Hooker's vocal alternates between sung and spoken sections. Commenting on Hooker's vocal sections, music historian Ted Gioia notes, "The song has almost no melody. Even less harmony. In fact, it is hard to call it a song. It's more like a bit of jive stream of consciousness in 4/4 time." Some of the lyrics are borrowed from earlier songs that date back to the beginning of the blues. The opening line "My mama she didn't allow me to stay out all night long" has origins in "Mama Don't Allow", an old dance song. Several songs were recorded in the 1920s with similar titles. "Boogie No. 3" by boogie-woogie pianist Cow Cow Davenport has sung and spoken sections and includes the lines, "I don't care what Grandma don't allow, play my music anyhow, Grandma's don't 'llow no music playin' in here". Hooker's first and second takes of the song include similar verses and the narrative about Henry's Swing Club, but do not include the crucial mid-song hook "Boogie, chillen'!" before the guitar break, which gives the song its lyrical identity. A key feature of the song is the driving guitar rhythmic figure centered on one chord, with "accents that fell fractionally ahead of the beat". Music journalist Charles Shaar Murray describes it as a "rocking dance piece ... its structure is utterly free-form, its basic beat is the jumping, polyrhythmic groove which he [Hooker] learned in the Delta". In an interview with B.B. King,