Song
"Juke" is played as a swinging shuffle featuring a boogie-woogie guitar pattern, and is originally in the major key of E; Walter played it in 'second position' (cross harp) on a harmonica tuned to the key of A. "Juke" is a standard 12-Bar blues song, set for the most part in the time signature of 4:4, but its time changes once to 3:4 and once to 2:4. "Juke" contains 8 choruses.
The harmonica playing in "Juke" is deep-toned and features long saxophone-like phrases. "Juke" is a dynamic song, building and releasing in intensity several times. The opening eight bars of the song, or "head", consist of a repeated six note phrase commonly and frequently played by jazz and swing horn players in the 1930s and '40s, but of undetermined origin. The remainder of the song is an improvisation of Little Walter's own invention.
"Juke" was originally titled on the recording session log as "Your Pat Will Play"; later it was discovered that this was a mistake, a mis-hearing of Little Walter's intended title, "Your Cat Will Play". The song was renamed "Juke" upon release in July 1952, probably by label owner Leonard Chess.
Junior Wells later claimed that he was playing "Juke" prior to Little Walter's recording of it, although Wells never recorded his version. Snooky Pryor's 1948 recording "Snooky and Moody's Boogie," begins with the same repeated ascending riff that Little Walter uses in the first eight bars of "Juke", although the remainder is distinctly different. (Pryor himself claimed in an interview that Walter "picked up 'Snooky and Moody's Boogie' and made 'Juke' out of it.") Jimmy Rogers, guitarist on "Juke", claimed that parts of "Juke" were based on an unrecorded intermission/theme song frequently played by piano player Sunnyland Slim, which he called "Get Up The Stairs Madamoiselle".
"Juke" has been covered by Big Walter Horton, James Cotton, Billy Branch, Paul Butterfield and Carey Bell, among others.
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