#276: (Boogie Woogie) Dancin’ Shoes by Claudia Barry
Peak Month: December 1978
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
1 week Playlist
Peak Position #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #56
YouTube: “(Boogie Woogie) Dancin’ Shoes”
Lyrics: “(Boogie Woogie) Dancin’ Shoes”
Claudja Barry was born in Jamaica in 1952. At the age of six, Barry and her family emigrated from to Canada and settled in Scarborough, Ontario. From an early age she was inspired by the music of Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole. In her mid-teens she began to take vocal lessons and started dancing. In an interview on Extraordinary Women TV in 2013, Barry relates that after graduation from high school, she travelled to Europe to study classical voice. It was there that she got cast in the musical Hair. Subsequently, she was cast in in a production of Catch My Soul which toured Europe in 1974-75. The rock musical is an adaption of Shakespeare’s Othello. In the spring of ’75 she ended up in West Germany. That same year she signed with Hot Foot label and released a single called “Reggae Bump”. In 1976 she released her debut album Sweet Dynamite.