My musical awakenings in the UK were rather varied. Like many who spent much of their later life in the blues field, my earliest years were spent in church. I was a choirboy at St.Michael's in Winchester, Hants, singing with great enthusiasm hymns like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers' and Bunyan's ‘To Be A Pilgrim ‘ and not so enthusiastically most of the other songs in the hymnal. Of course, the ‘many’ referred to in the second sentence were invariably African-American and sang in sanctified churches in the gospel tradition. I was very white and sang in a very cold, ancient and austere Protestant church in the south of England.
I emphasize the church roots not so much because of the color of my skin - very white and caucasian - but because mingling with the other choirboys gave me an introduction to musicians I had not previously heard of. Regarding the blues part, my life in blues has been as a fan and
associate of musicians. But once, just once, I did aspire to be a musician. A little more of that
later.
There was not much to be heard on the radio in the UK in the 50s that was very appealing - indeed, there were very few radio programs devoted to popular music. The BBC ruled the airwaves - by government fiat - with three programs. The Light Programme, The Home Service, and The Third Programme. Of these three programs, the latter two, regional and highbrow, avoided the kind of light entertainment to be found on the Light Programme.
The vast majority of the shows were variety shows, comedies, and dramas. There were a handful of disc jockey-type shows, such as ‘Housewives’ Choice,' 'Record Round-Up,' 'Desert Island Discs’ and ‘The Jack Payne Record Show.' For the budding Rock 'n' Roll fan, it was pretty much a barren desert.
Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, certain tunes and artists got through. Bill Haley and Tommy Steele -the UK's first own Rock 'n' Roller - were unstoppable.
And then there was Lonnie Donegan.
His 1954 recording of 'Rock lsland Line', made while he was a member of Chris Barber's Jazz Band, was released late in 1955 and became a worldwide hit in 1956. An uptempo version of an old US folk song, probably based on Leadbelly's various recordings of it, 'Rock Island Line'
introduced 'skiffle' to the masses, and things in the UK were never the same again. As Donegan
had made the record as a salaried member of Barber's band, he only received twelve and a half
pounds for his million-selling recording, but it did provide the launch pad for his very successful career. Nevertheless, he remained bitter about this apparent injustice for the rest of his life.
Along with Chris Barber, he had started out with jazzman Ken Colyer, w had begun featuring a skiffle group as a 'band within a band' during his shows in the early 50s. Indeed, Colyer, Barber and Donegan bear much of the credit for introducing blues to the UK.
Ken Colyer; Alex Korner; Lonnie Donegan; Bill Colyer and Chris Barber
As Donegan parlayed American blues and folk songs into skiffle and in doing so, brought together, in the eyes and ears of the British public, Rock 'n' Roll and Skiffle. Rock 'n' Roll to that point in the UK was an English version of Bill Haley - saxophones and electric guitars. Skiffle seemed to be much more anarchic (and perhaps, through the lens of time, more akin to US Rockabilly). Its main strength was its accessibility. Washboard, tea chest bass (fabricated from a wooden chest, a broom handle, and string), and a guitar. The latter was the only real musical instrument required. The two former instruments could respectively be purchased at hardware stores and cobbled together from items found around the house. By the middle of the year, there were countless skiffle groups around the country. It has been estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 skiffle groups were formed during this period. Music stores, who just a few months before didn't carry guitars at all, now could not keep them in stock.
Record companies signed Chas McDevitt, Shirley Douglas, Nancy Whisky, The Avon Cities Skiffle Group, The Vipers, The City Ramblers and dozens of others.
Skifle became an amateur revolution. Anyone could play it. My friends and I would gather in our
garage -yes, a garage band in 1956 - and joyfully disturb the peace of the neighborhood for
hours. No matter that we didn't have a metal washboard - all we could find was a glass one. Sure, it didn't seem to sound right, but it WAS a washboard, dammit! We did have a tea chest and a broom handle, but for some odd reason, we couldn't find a nice piece of string, so we used a curtain wire. Interestingly, it was rather prescient because it was a wound round spring of perhaps three or four feet in length. Sort of a really giant bass string. It did make a jolly good bo-ing bo-ing sound, at least when it didn't slip off the top of the broom handle. I had a plastic guitar, with a box-like contraption with buttons that formed chords, that slid over the neck.
We learned the words to things like 'Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O', 'Worried Man', 'Freight Train'
and 'Gamblin'Man,' which we sang with a frenzy and intensity that would have made Little Richard run for cover. I pressed and released the chord thing on the guitar with great
enthusiasm coupled with a total lack of concern for what the song might require, while my cohorts strummed and bo-inged away to their hearts' content.
So skiffle was the result of the miserable radio programming of the grown-ups. Screw listening to the radio - we'll do it ourselves. No one will ever know just how many future musicians started out like this in the UK, but it is a fair bet that the vast majority of later UK rock musicians began their careers in skiffle groups. Certainly, the Beatles did.
So these guys mainly learned about blues and US folk from Donegan and his imitators originally, and in doing so, added their own Englishness to it. No wonder that the English Blues and rock bands of the sixties didn't really swing, but made it into something new.
And then the progressive bands of the seventies became as boring to the younger teens as the Billy Cotton Band had been to us in the early 50's.
And so punk was born. In just the same manner as skiffle.
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Check out Billy Bragg's fine history of skiffle: "Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World" Faber and Faber, 2017.
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