1974 as "dance to boogie music," a late 1960s style of rock music based on blues chords; earlier it was the name of a style of blues (1941, also as a verb), short for boogie-woogie (1928), a rhyming reduplication of the noun boogie (1917), which meant "rent party" in American English slang. A song title, "That Syncopated Boogie-boo," appears in a copyright listing from 1912. As a derogatory term for "black person" by 1923.
