Should you be searching for the most glamorous pair ever to have engaged in lexical research, go to Howard Hawks’s 1941 comedy Ball of Fire.  There, Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), on the hunt for slang terms to write down in his notebook, finds an informant in the nightclub performer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck).  Here’s the latter’s big number “Drum Boogie,” performed along with the Gene Krupa Band and incidentally with Martha Tilton, not Stanwyck, actually doing the singing.

As Sugarpuss uses it, “boogie” means “party”; a “drum boogie” is a party with jazz percussion—“You hear the rhythm rompin’, / You see the drummer stompin’ . . .”  The word came into circulation, with the particular meaning “rent party,” around 1920, at the same time that another “boogie” appeared, this one a derogatory, highly offensive term for black people.  Could these two meanings be related?  It’s possible.  Certainly, all the citations listed by the OED for the “party” sense come from the jazz or blues world.  A boogie to raise the rent for an apartment in Harlem or on the South Side of Chicago might lack Gene Krupa and Barbara Stanwyck but have a blues pianist in to entertain everyone.  A couple of decades later, the music he played, with a strongly rhythmical repeated bass line, would be called “boogie woogie.”

As for the source of “boogie,” that would seem to be a cluster of related terms—“bogy,” “bogey,” “bogle,” “the bogey man”—referring to the Devil, the Evil One, a goblin, a figure to scare children with, and so on.  From that starting point meanings spread out and diversify, but curiously, tend to preserve the sense “something unwelcome.”  “Bogey” is an English criminal’s word for the police.  Also, something which with clinical precision the OED calls “a piece of dried nasal mucus.”  Also, an enemy aircraft, as in that warning shouted into the cockpit microphone in dozens of World War II movies—“Bogeys!  Ten o’clock high!”  Speaking of movies, a non-crew member wandering onto a set during filming and getting in the way is a “bogey.”  And, finally, on a golf course the word means “one over par.”  How the sporting term came into use is the subject of one of the OED’s longest and most captivating word histories, involving two late-nineteenth-century gentlemen proceeding from hole to hole on an English course, plus—here we return to Sugarpuss O’Shea’s world of musical performance—a hit song of the 1890s, “The Bogie Man,” from the “operatic extravaganza” Sinbad.

You should read the complete etymology in the OED.  It’s a “killer diller,” as Sugarpuss would say.