Skiffle legends (1) Lonnie Donegan Part 1

One figure casts an Elvis-like shadow over the skiffle boom, and that's Lonnie Donegan.

Tony Donegan was born in Glasgow, but the family moved to East Ham, in London, hence him having a bit of a Cockney twang. His mother was from Omagh, (Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland), a fact that may seem largely irrelevant, but will assume greater importance in the context of the blog in due course.

Donegan's career will, as we will see, regularly have Irish (and in particular Northern Irish) touchstones throughout it.

Everyone probably knows Donegan's big hits like 'Rock Island Line' and the novelty songs 'Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight', and 'My Old Man's a dustman', songs that perhaps tainted skiffle with a 'not quite serious music' label. Well, of course it's not 'serious' music. It's fun. It's meant to be fun.

'Rock Island Line' was first recorded by Alan Lomax, featuring inmates from Arkansas Sate Prison in 1934, and was later popularised by Huddie Leadbetter, Leadbelly.

Lonnie Donegan's version of 'Rock Island Line', a No. 8 hit in both the UK & the US.

Does your chewing gum lose its flavour?

'Does your chewing gum' was a cover version, the original being issued in 1924 as 'Does the Spearmint lose its flavour'. In the late fifties, the BBC was the only radio service in the UK, and it didn't (and still doesn't) do advertising. As 'Spearmint' was a trademark (Wrigley's Spearmint Gum), the BBC would not have played the record, hence the words being altered so as not to advertise anything.

The Happiness Boys' 1924 original.

There's a lot to Lonnie Donegan, much deeper than one might guess at first glance. While his recordings mined Leadbelly, blues and folk music, styles that would archetypically mould themselves into classic skiffle, Donegan's Irish roots were also well to the fore in some of his lesser known recordings (and there are many hidden gems in his catalogue once you step away from 'the hits'.

Donegan's version of the Irish ballad 'Kevin Barry'.

I'm guessing, of course, but I imagine that his Irish ancestry, and part-Glaswegian upbringing would have exposed Lonnie to Irish music and culture, and he will have been aware of the song throughout his life.

We'll come back to this aspect of Donegan's recordings again in due course.

I'm going to finish up this post with the following video...

The Quarrymen 'Putting on the style'

Lonnie Donegan was No.1 on July 6th, 1957 with 'Putting on the style'. The Quarrymen, led by a young John Lennon, were playing Woollen Village Fete, when an even younger Paul McCartney went along and was introduced to Lennon the same day. The rest, as they say, is history...

Apologies for the scattergun approach to all of this. The idea isn't to do a chronological history of skiffle, but to draw various elements of it together and eventually present a proper overview. In the meantime, while I grasp this blogging lark, please be patient until some sort of style emerges.

Contemporary skiffle

From time to time, I'd like to link to contemporary skiffle bands, to demonstrate that there's still a following for skiffle.

First up, let me introduce The Ugly Dog Skiffle Combo.

They're from Norfolk, here in the UK, and I'm particularly taken with their tagline, 'destroying musical snobbery one skiffle chord at a time'.

There's certainly something in that claim. There is a musical snobbery about skiffle. The idea that the chords are simple, the idea that some of the instruments aren't instruments at all, but the contents of a hardware store. To sneer at that misses the point, the point being that skiffle lives and breathes precisely because it's simple. Anyone can do it!

We're in a world over-run by software, detached from the simple pleasure of making music without a degree in computer science or years of practice on which the main purpose can sometimes be only described as 'showing off'.

So it's good to know that, for many of us, the 'KISS' approach (Keep it simple, stupid) still plays a pivotal role in music making.

I'll be providing links to many UK (and further afield) skiffle bands as the blog progresses, and I'd encourage you to chase down the links.

As we go along, I do hope that we can kickstart a wider interest in skiffle, and perhaps encourage others to think about getting involved with skiffle.

Skiffle : A brief history (Part 1)

We can begin our exploration of what skiffle is by looking at its entry in wikipedia.

It's a musical style combining jazz, blues, folk and roots influences, often featuring home made instruments. The style we know as skiffle originates amongst African-Americans in the early part of the 20th century, and featured many 'home made' instruments, due in no small part to the poverty those African-Americans would have experienced on a daily basis. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The first use of the word 'skiffle', on record, appears in 1925, with Jimmy O'Bryant' & His Chicago Skifflers.

Here's an example of O'Bryant's band on disc.

Jimmy O'Bryant's 'Washboard Blues'

The word 'skiffle' was still in common use in the 1940s, as the following record by Dan Burley & His Skiffle Boys demonstrates.

Dan Burley & His Skiffle Boys

Note that one of the guitarists on this record is Brownie McGhee. Brownie, best known for his work with Sonny Terry, had something more of a country blues approach to guitar, but the duo certainly played songs that wouldn't be out of place in a skiffle band's repertoire.

Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee's 'Born & Living with the blues'

Shortly thereafter, the word 'skiffle' appears to fall into dis-use in America. We'll return to some aspects of the blues, and its role in the skiffle boom, as the blog develops but for now, in 'Part 2' of a brief history of skiffle, I'd like to concentrate on the 1950s revival in the UK.

After that, we'll begin to backtrack a little.

Here's three chords, now form a band

In 1976, Mark Perry's 'Sniffin' Glue' fanzine printed a 'call to arms' in the form of the above diagram. 'Here's three chords, now form a band'. Thousands did. The UK was once more in the grip of a 'DIY' musical movement that was brash, loud and exciting.

I say 'once more' because twenty years earlier, the UK had had its first 'DIY' musical movement - skiffle. We'll get on to skiffle's definition, history, and leading lights in due course, but by way of explanation let me say that I'd looked for a blog on skiffle on the internet and found there weren't that many sources, hence my decision to create my own blog.

It's not, in all probability, going to be the definitive source of all things skiffle, but I hope it does provide some insight into a short-lived phenomenon that would give way to the all-out assault of rock and roll. It remains, however, an important step on the route to the UK leading the world in popular music in the 1960s, with many of pop music's leading lights -those they call 'the legacy artists' today (Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page) having their own beginnings in the skiffle craze of the 1950s.