Shuffle ‘em Up Playlist

In musical terms I bet you’ve all heard of it. But, what exactly is a “shuffle”? A shuffle beat is defined as “a rhythmic pattern characterized by alternating long and short notes, often based on triplet subdivisions…and can be thought of as a “skip” or “gallop” in rhythm.”

Did that help you? Nah, it didn’t really help me that much either.

But there are certainly a lot of songs that include “shuffle” in the title as a signifier, from Springsteen to The Stones and Herb Albert to Tom Jones.

You can also count J. Geils, the Doobies, Boz Scaggs and the Dead. There’s even one by the Jump ‘N’ The Saddle Band. Not recognizing them? Not to worry, you’ll remember the song as well as you would getting poked in the eye or conked on the head.

Naturally, I’ve compiled a new SMGM playlist for the topic, “Shuffle ‘em Up” – 24 songs all with “shuffle” in the title. Only when I listened to them I came away thinking that none of them really contained the beat described above at all. Odd. What gives, shufflers? So I read the definition again, something different clicked about how that should sound, listened through another time, and then I thought that maybe, almost definitely, it could be heard in pretty much…all of them. Could that really be? After further intense examination and scrutiny, I’m now convinced that in reality some form of shuffle beat can actually be found in exactly 11 of these songs. I’m just not sure of which 11, though.

In any case, I hope you’ll give “Shuffle ‘em Up” your own listen. Regardless of the presence of a verifiable shuffle beat, there’s two dozen excellent tunes. It’s possible it could even bring about some kind of a panacea: as Albert Collins sings in our 8th track, “There ain’t nothing in the world that a T-Bone Shuffle won’t cure.”

And, although I typically labor over a playlist’s sequencing, don’t even worry about hearing these in the assigned order; for this one you might as well set Spotify to play them on shuffle.