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Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World

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Author:Billy Bragg

As time goes on, the 1950s becomes an increasingly fascinating place – certainly, one that has been (to date) far less mined by cultural archaeologists that the decade that followed it. One can easily set aside the thought that this is a book written by someone who is well-known in another medium because it is, simply, a brilliantly written, accessible slab of social and cultural history whose author tells the tale with a light touch that belies the very substantial groundwork he’s put in.

I’ve read a lot on this era – both primary sources and retrospective books like Pete Frame’s ‘Restless Generation’, Dave Gelly’s fantastic ‘An Unholy Row’, and Ken Colyer’s cranky autobiography ‘When Dreams Are In The Dust’ – and Bragg not only uses his sources well but has trawled very widely and drawn from some very obscure sources indeed (like Michael Moorcock’s late 50s fanzine ‘Jazz Fan’, regional newspapers, and Lonnie Donegan’s fan club brochures).

Bragg’s way with words is terrifific. There are some great turns of phrase every so often that raise a smile, and if I had any fears that there might be chunks of lefty polemics or overly laboured comparisons between skiffle and punk, these were unfounded. Yes, he makes a couple of brief references to skiffle/punk similarities, but only in passing, saving the best till the end where, by a kind of wonderful happenstance, the artist on at the 100 Club the night after its punk festival in 1976 was Ken Colyer, a confrontational, deliberately primitivist, socially awkward, anti-establishment man who found his outlet in a music that became both tribal and liberating and swept the nation over 20 years earlier – a music that he had more or less invented: skiffle.

Bragg’s book has the trajectory and dynamics of a Lonnie Donegan song, in a way – like ‘Rock Island Line’ – starting slow, setting the scene, painting a picture of a world, and gradually building up a head of stream, pulling in information and slogans and mayhem and becoming a thrilling ride for the listener/reader.

The subtitle, though, slightly undersells the content – or limits the main title (which covers the content much more accurately). Skiffle, and the youth revolution it began, is the bedrock of the book but Bragg weaves in various strands of mid to late 50s popular culture – trad jazz (the progenitor/first platform of skiffle), Teddy Boys, British rock’n’roll, the 2 Is, impresarios, variety tours, Light Entertainment broadcasting, the beginnings of the folk club boom, the beginnings of R&B – along with a dash of social spice in immigration, Aldermaston marches and the brief attempted revival of Oswald Mosely and his cronies in Notting Hill.

All of this is done with a light touch and a canny eye for good quotes, period detail and the odd pithy aside to the reader. The story rattles along and becomes a real page-turner. These kind of books are far harder to get published than you might imagine. Knowing a little about Faber & Faber, the fact that this book was being written by a ‘celeb’ with a certain cachet will have almost certainly got it over the commissioning line – if I or almost anyone else had gone to Faber with the idea of a heavyweight book on skiffle I honestly doubt it would have been accepted. In that sense, Bragg has ‘beaten the system’ – just like skiffle or punk. He was, by wonderful luck, exactly the right person to write this book. He has an empathy with the subject, an enquiring mind, a mastery of story-telling and his songwriting career has really helped with his expositions on the writing of and often fascinating background to certain songs crucial to the skiffle phenomenon – from the dam-busting ‘Rock Island Line’ to the seemingly pointless ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’. Very often, Bragg’s research or perspective will make one look at something in a different light – ‘Expresso Bongo’, for instance, transforms from a half-remembered Cliff Richard vehicle into a socially important artefact of its era. The errors I noticed were very few indeed (no book is immune!) – a couple I recall are Bragg anachronistically using the term ‘100 Club’ two or three times when he was, in fact, referring to the premises during a period when it was under different management and known by a couple of different names; and in one photo blues godfather Cyril Davies is captioned ‘Cyril Smith'(!).

One very much hopes that Bragg will turn his hand to other musical history books.

Length of Read:Long

Might appeal to people who enjoyed…

Dave Gelly’s ‘An Unholy Row’, Mick Houghton’s ‘Becoming Elektra’, my own ‘Dazzling Stranger’ – that sort of thing: books about scenes and interweaving stories from distant eras.

One thing you’ve learned

That Les Bennetts, guitarist with Les Hobeaux, was probably the first British musician to say **** on record.

1

Comments

  1. The one curious error that Bill makes in the book is stating that the BBC never recorded any episodes of the 1957-58 show ‘Six Five Special’. In fact, there is at least one taped – which has been reshown on BBC4 – and I believe two (one each from 1957 and ’58), aside from the spin-off film.

    Here’s Chris Barber & Ottilie Patterson in one of them:

  3. Books on skiffle are so thin on the ground that it’s a must-buy for me.

    The disconnect that exists for the period, all the way through to 1964, never fails to astound me, and makes Mark Lamarr’s absence from the radio dial so acute.
    Starting the “History of Rock” magazine series from 1965, I ask you.

    • Bill’s very good on the disconnect between ‘American skiffle’ and ‘British skiffle’. For a start, the term in the US in the 30s-40s was never intended as a musical genre – just an event (a house rent party). In the wake of Lonnie’s surprise US chart success with Rock Island Line’ there were attempts from US labels to cash in, but they never understood it. Bragg’s good on Lonnie’s half-baked (through no fault of his own) 1950s US tour too.

  5. “Bragg’s book has the trajectory and dynamics of a Lonnie Donegan song, in a way – like ‘Rock Island Line’ – starting slow, setting the scene, painting a picture of a world, and gradually building up a head of stream, pulling in information and slogans and mayhem and becoming a thrilling ride for the listener/reader.”

    Nice work, Colin! I’ll buy this – more for my interest in the period than the actual music, which I always found a bit meh…

    • I agree Mike – a lot of the music may not have stood the test of time but it had a deep impact on the nature of the culture, which can be seen more in retrospect than at the time. But Lonnie was always a great performer…

  8. If you take “Rock Island Line” as the start, charting in January ’56, the skiffle craze was a mighty slow-burner, and precious few skiffle groups seemed to actually do “Rock Island Line” anyway!

    The first hint of it in my local East London newspaper was in about September 1956, and appeared to be more of a student rag week/folkie thing with no mention of the word “skiffle.” The kind of revue that was probably being done in 1955 or 1954 or 1953.

    I reckon that, and perhaps Billy Bragg came to the same conclusion, the biggest catalyst was Lonnie’s “Showcase” album, around Christmas ’56.

    The completely bog-average example of the craze were, handily enough, The Quarrymen, who tick all the boxes (numerous members, 2nd in various competitions, barely known beyond a half-mile radius, cut an acetate of which they could only afford one!) and didn’t perform until, if memory serves, the summer of the following year, June 1957 … long after many of the rock ‘n’ rollers, e.g. Gene Vincent, Elvis, Little Richard, had already charted in the U.K.

    Arguably the most interesting, and certainly the least researched yet most far-reaching, pop music of the post-war years.

    • It was an even slower-burner if you take, as Bill does, the beginnings to lie in Ken Colyer’s 1952 post-New Orleans-trip band. But whatever the start point, it was definitely a fast-finsher: pretty much over by some point in 1958 (notwishstanding Donegan’s subsequent hits – but Lon was a special case)…

      C

      • Although resolutely unhip folk like grandmothers and their ilk routinely referred to most forms of pop as skiffle quite a long way into the 60s, especially when complaining about it.

    • A lot of the Bear Family boxes are great and have stuff that can’t be found elsewhere. But there are tons of ‘Out Of Copyright’ box sets of Skiffle for the anyone that can’t afford £100. The mastering won’t be as good and there won’t be the bag of goodies that you get with Bear Family. I got a right cheapie called ‘Skiffle Sensation’ – 10 CDs, 200 tracks for around a tenner.

    • ‘Folksong with a Jazz Beat’, wasn’t it? I don’t have it but I do have the Chas McDevitt and Mike Dewe books from the late 90s. And that, up till now, was the sum total of book-length skiffle-ology.

      • I can’t remember the title, but I borrowed an original hardback from Ilford library listed under “stock,” so that the librarian had to walk a couple of miles to retrieve it while I waited. Almost long enough for a skiffle revival!

        Those two books you mentioned were, I think, the only two that specifically mention skiffle in the title, and were released almost simultaneously c.1997/1998.
        You wait for a skiffle book for 40 years, and two turn up at once.

        I’ve often wondered if there isn’t a market for a picture book of skiffle groups. The soon-to-be-famous, the quirky, the completely anonymous, the “the-guy-on-the-left-on-kazoo-went-on-to-run-Lloyd’s Bank” type thing.
        I know that I find the subject more fascinating than anyone really should.

        • Ha – a skiffle revival coming and going in the time it takes a librarian to find a book about it – very good! 🙂

          I’m often interested in reading books about music I have little interest in listening to – or, certainly, less interest in listening to than reading about.

  11. I’m half way through. Loving it. So much of it is stuff that is already on my radar (New Orleans, the UK Folk Revival) but this tells its own story. I have one of the cheap Skiffle Box Set (10 CDs). I wouldn’t spring for the Bear Family Box at that price. Get a cheapie box and use Spotify to fill in the gaps (Lonnie’s The Skiffle Years 1953 – 1957 fills in all the Donegan Gaps (50 miles on the Donegan Gaps).
    Who would have guessed that Billy Bragg would be such a great historian back when he was shouting at Thatch?

  12. I was a roots radical
    I was a rocker
    I was a biographer
    Between the wars
    I raised a number of questions on matters historical
    In times of austerity
    With sweat at the British library
    Between the wars

    I paid the Society of Authors and as times got harder
    I looked to the discerning buyer of non-fiction literature to help the working man
    And they brought prosperity down at the printing works
    We’re arming for healthy sales and limited returns, me boys
    Between the wars

    I kept the faith and I kept writing
    Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand
    For theirs is a land with prohibitive online delivery costs and questionable tax liability
    And mine is a faith in my fellow man
    Theirs is a land of hope and glory
    Mine is the green field and a PC with MS Word
    Theirs are the skies all dark with delivery drones
    And mine is the bricks and mortar bookshops we know
    Between the wars

    Call up the broadsheet reviewers
    Bring me the publicists
    Build me a path from research to sales
    And I’ll give my consent
    To any skiffle die-hard, Afterword regular or casual browser
    That does not deny a man a living wage

  13. Here’s one that I found while digging through 200 skiffle tracks on said cheapie box set. Essentially a commercial for Timpson’s The Cobbler. I found one Google entry from someone selling the actual 78. It seems there were only 200 pressed, one-sided 78RPM.
    I posted this one
    Bob Cort’s Skiffle Group
    The Shop In The Cellar
    (Circa 19657 I’m guessing)

  14. Rab Noakes describes his latest album “I’m Walkin’ Here” as 21st Century skiffle. He was a skiffle player and lover back in the day. Unfortunately, the cd isn’t on YouTube but it’s on bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes etc. Very good it is too.

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