Advertisement

arts entertainmentBooks

Never heard of skiffle? You'll want to after 'Roots, Radicals and Rockers'

Billy Bragg tells the story of the music that shaped everyone from John Lennon to Jimmy Page — and terrorized England along the way.

Most people with even a cursory interest in popular music could name the king of rock 'n' roll and the king of pop, but ask them who the king of skiffle was and you might get a blank stare, perhaps followed by a query:

What's skiffle?

Skiffle bridged the gap between several strains of American roots music — blues, folk  and "trad jazz" — and English rock 'n' roll. In his passionate history Roots, Radicals and Rockers, Billy Bragg —  a punker-turned-folkie musician of some 40 years' tenure — has written a thorough, compelling survey of a transitional genre that burned briefly but brightly in the U.K. in the latter 1950s.

Advertisement

By the time Liverpool's Quarrymen skiffle group had changed its name to Long John and the Silver Beetles, then just the Silver Beetles, and then the Silver Beatles, with one more decisive stroke of streamlining to follow, the train-obsessed genre had left the station for good. But Bragg makes a persuasive case that skiffle was the punk before punk, reshaping and democratizing the pop charts and terrifying the geriatric (read: 30-plus) populace just as Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer would two decades later.

News Roundups

Catch up on the day's news you need to know.

Or with:

A 15-year-old Paul McCartney making his debut public performance with the Quarrymen  (from...
A 15-year-old Paul McCartney making his debut public performance with the Quarrymen (from left) Colin Hanton (drummer), McCartney (guitar), Len Garry (bass), John Lennon (guitar) and Eric Griffiths (guitar). ( / EPA))

Gray and austere, postwar England was a soft target for a youth-oriented takeover: Teenagers, for the first time, had time on their hands and money in their pockets. The music industry, though, remained a business by and for the olds. "Public taste was largely dictated by a small clique of music publishers based in London's Denmark Street," Bragg writes, "and by the dead hand of the BBC, whose broadcasting monopoly ensured that popular music was kept bland and unthreatening."

Advertisement

Bragg has dedicated his volume not to Lonnie Donegan — the king of skiffle, just in case it ever comes up — but to "every kid who ever picked up a guitar after hearing Lonnie Donegan." In the 400 pages to come, that list is revealed to include Jimmy Page, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Van Morrison and Rod Stewart, among many more obscure others.

The jacket of Lonnie Donegan's album Showcase from  Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle...
The jacket of Lonnie Donegan's album Showcase from Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World, by Billy Bragg(Faber & Faber)

Donegan's 1954 recording of "Rock Island Line" (a tune Louisiana bluesman Lead Belly had recorded several times) is pegged as the magna carta of the movement, having become a hit in the U.K. and the U.S., making Donegan, a 24-year-old player in a jazz band, an accidental star.

As good a writer as Bragg is, some imagination on the part of the reader is still necessary to conjure a time and place wherein a genre of music performed on a guitar, a "tea chest bass," and a washboard could be deemed so rhythmic and suggestive that it threatened public decency and order.

Advertisement

Maybe it was less the music as the age of the performers: Skiffle was a music for and by the young, in a culture that feared the young even when they adopted the style of the old and/or dead. Bragg's deeply-sourced account draws on early '50s newspaper reports of "Teddy Boys" in flamboyant Edwardian dress roaming the streets of London in packs and being banned from cinemas, the only places where kids could congregate on Sundays.

Bragg is already 75 percent of the way through his investigation when he reports that a March 1957 issue of the venerable British music weekly Melody Maker "put skiffle on trial," asking readers if this easy-to-play style was "a creative music, a menace, or just a form of rock 'n' roll." The 20-year-old teen idol singer and actor Tommy Steele opined that "Skiffle is more intellectual" than rock, though he performed both. Melody Maker's own Bob Dawbarn, a jazz trombonist-turned-journalist then in his late 20s, decried skiffle as "the dreariest rubbish to be inflicted on the British public since the last rash of Al Jolson imitators ... a bastardised, commercialised [sic] form of [jazz], watered down to suit the sickly, orange-juice tastes of musical illiterates."

The founding fathers of British rock:  Ken Colyer (left), Alexis Korner, Lonnie Donegan,...
The founding fathers of British rock: Ken Colyer (left), Alexis Korner, Lonnie Donegan, Bill Colyer (seated) and Chris Barber play together in Ken Colyer's Skiffle Group, 1953. From Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World, by Billy Bragg.(Faber & Faber)

To that tantrum of sour-grape-sucking condescension, Bragg appends this: "Dawbarn was no doubt mumbling that last phrase under his breath five years later when, as editor of Melody Maker, he had Bob Dylan thrown out of the paper's office."

The more telling excerpt might be this one, from an Observer article published three months after that issue of Melody Maker: "The remarkable thing is that in an age of high-fidelity sound, long players and tape recorders, the young should suddenly decide to make their own music." That's a decision each subsequent generation has made, too. Bragg tells the story of when and where it happened first.

Chris Klimek is an editor for Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine and a contributor to NPR, The Washington City Paper and other publications. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Roots, Radicals and Rockers

How Skiffle Changed the World 

Advertisement

Billy Bragg

(Faber & Faber, $29.95)