August Free Sheet Music: Boogie #5!

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (Art Institute of Chicago)

It's August, and time to wrap up your Boogie Woogie lessons with Boogie #5 this week. I hope you have been enjoying learning to play this quintessential piano style and are gradually getting comfortable with the left hand repeating pattern, while playing right hand melodies. This month we raise the bar with the most difficult right hand melody of them all. The 4 notes you play in the right hand in each measure will follow along with the left hand rhythm. That seems pretty straight forward, but it is, as you might guess, tricky to play, at first. It's important to keep your left hand/arm loose and relaxed; that is easier to do at a slow tempo, so keep your left hand slow and steady as you learn your right hand notes.

PRINT Boogie Woogie #5

Since Boogie #5 is the last boogie in the series, I created an ending by stopping on the "&" of beat 2. As you can see, I moved my left hand back to C/G on the "&" of 2 to resolve back to the C chord. This is just an idea - you can find a different ending, or just play the music as written without an ending.

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Melinda (left) and Me at The Piano Conference: NCKP 2025

How is your summer going? I recently returned from NCKP, the National Conference for Keyboard Pedagogy, in the Chicago area. I met up with my friend and colleague Melinda Bateman at the conference (she lives nearby in Michigan), and we had a wonderful time. Melinda has doggedly edited all of my Upper Hands Piano and The Music Remedy books, and she is an excellent pianist and piano teacher as well. We attended many classes by experts in the piano pedagogy field, and gave a talk about teaching older adults, about how the brain learns and retains musical information, and we presented our Upper Hands Piano books to our colleagues. It was so inspiring to be with piano teachers from all over the country and several from other countries; we all loved exchanging ideas and sharing our love for teaching piano.

The River Walk

In addition to attending the conference, Melinda and I toured around Chicago a bit. It was my first time there, and I thought it was a gorgeous city. We took an architectural tour through downtown Chicago, and also enjoyed the stupendous "River Walk."

The Bean (Cloud Gate) at Millenium Park

Aqua Tower

The Wrigley Building (the clocktower)

The Chicago Picasso sculpture

The juxtaposition of the old with the modern buildings integrated beautifully, and it was great to see that public art is a top priority in Chicago, including this huge sculpture by Picasso (which I thought looked kind of like a sea serpent but is untitled!)

We also got to visit the Art Institute of Chicago and I thought Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (my photo of the painting is at the top of this page) had a bluesy feel to it, appropriate for my final Boogie sheet music today. There were so many gorgeous paintings, statues and sculptures that left me absolutely breathless; I hope you can visit someday!

Thanks for delving into my 5-part Boogie Woogie tutorials. Boogie is super fun to play and to listen to, so I hope you will persevere, and work towards playing all 5 in a row, without pausing in between the pages. You can tape the pages together so they will span across your piano's music rest for easy viewing. More advanced students can try improvising to the boogie woogie bass using the C Blues Scale:

C - Eb - F - F# - G - Bb - C

Enjoy the rest of your summer and I'll be back with more free sheet music and practice tips, soon. With love and music, Gaili

P.S. Please visit UpperHandsPiano.com to learn more about our piano instruction books for adults over 50 and our many songbook collections. Thanks for your support!