Roots, Radicals and Rockers

Today I’m reviewing Billy Bragg’s, “Roots Rockers and Radicals: How Skiffle Changed the World.” I’m guessing the first question most Americans would have is why a book on Skiffle? Or maybe even what is Skiffle? And the short answer is that without Britain’s 1950s Skiffle music craze, there might never have been a Beatles, Yardbirds, or Who. And without these seminal bands, well, who knows how popular music might have evolved?

But this book is about so much more than Skiffle. It’s an amazing journey through more than 150 years of music history. It covers the African American jazz and blues roots of Skiffle. The influences of slavery, Jim Crow, racism, and imperialism. Union-driven closed-shop rules and Cold War secrecy, on the evolution of popular music, in general. It covers the resistance against fascism in post-war Britain. The antinuclear and anti-racism movements. And the political involvement of skiffle musicians and American folk musicians living in Britain at the time. In fact, the breadth, depth and class analysis of this book reminds me much more of Mike Davis’s ground breaking history of Los Angeles, “City of Quartz,” than any music history book I’ve ever read. 

A good book about music also makes you curious. It makes you want to go back and relisten to all those great songs that it talks about. Or to seek them out to hear them for the first time. And this book really does that, too!

The first song I wanted to hear was Lonnie Donegan’s version of “Rock Island Line.” If you are unfamiliar with Skiffle, I would recommend watching a video of him performing this song live. His 1954 recording is considered the birth of Skiffle. It came out just a few weeks after Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black recorded “That’s Alright,” often cited as the first Rock and Roll recording. After watching this video, and feeling the raw energy of Donegan’s performance, it is easy to see why kids were so quick to abandon the “drab conformity” and saccharine pop music of post war Britain for this much more exciting, guitar-driven sound.

It is also easy to see why so many youths decided to get guitars and start their own bands after hearing this recording. Bragg writes that Donegan broke the “fourth wall of Britain’s pop culture” by making it possible for working-class teens to “suddenly imagine themselves stepping out of the audience and into the pop pantheon.” Up until then, the common belief was that everything cool and exotic in pop culture came from America. Now they had something homegrown, that was their own, that really rocked, and that they could play on easily acquired instruments. It inspired Lennon and McCartney, Pete Townsend, Syd Barrett, David Bowie, Jimmy Page, and even the Bee Gees to pick up guitars and play Skiffle, and later Rock and Roll. 

But it wasn’t just early skiffle that this book made me want to listen to. Bragg also talks about how Skiffle opened the doors to the emergence, or reemergence, of other genres, like folk music. Just like how punk rock, two decades later, created space for musicians like Elvis Costello and Ian Drury, and folk musicians, like Billy Bragg, himself. Some of those folk musicians in 1950s Britain were actually Americans, like Alan Lomax, Rambling Jack Elliot, and Peggy Seeger. And this got me wanting to go back and listen to their music, too, particularly their collaborations with local British musicians, like Ewan MacColl, which I hadn’t heard before.

Seeger and MacColl, in particular, recorded some amazing music together, including “Dirty Old Town,” later covered by The Pogues. I also loved reading Bragg’s description of the diminutive Peggy Seeger riding her scooter with her banjo strapped to her back, and guitar clenched between her knees, with the much larger Lomax riding on the back.

I discovered the Lead Belly version of “Rock Island Line” when I was in my teens. And the Johnny Cash version in my early 20s, after scoring a one-dollar used copy of his debut album at Berkeley’s Rasputin Records. The two versions have slightly different introductions. I had always attributed to Johnny Cash taking a bit of poetic license. But as Billy Bragg points out in his book, toll booths, which are referenced in both the Cash and Donegan versions, never existed on U.S. railroads, only on British ones. So, in reality, Cash was most likely covering Donegan’s version of the song. Not Lead Belly’s, which had no mention of toll booths. Indeed, twenty years later, when Cash was performing this song live, he invited Donegan to take a bow.

Cultural Appropriation or Cross Fertilization?

Many of the Trad Jazz purists in 1950s England criticized Skiffle as cultural appropriation, even though they, themselves, were white Englishmen performing the music of black American jazz artists. However, as Bragg points out in this book, and as he did at the Punks With Books event this past May, at Avantpop Books in Las Vegas, cultural appropriation is a problematic concept in this context. British rock of the 1960s had Skiffle at its roots. And Skiffle had, at its roots, African American Jazz and Blues which, in turn, was influenced by the music of New Orleans, which was influenced by the music of Africa and the Caribbean, with both French and Spanish influences. 

There were even Irish and British influences on American blues. Consider Donegan’s second big hit, “Stewball,” (1956), most likely adapted from Lead Belly’s version of the song. Lead Belly recorded this in 1946, with Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. Was this really a case of cultural appropriation, as the Trad Jazz critics of Skiffle might have claimed? According to Bragg, one could buy broadsides of the lyrics to the song “Skew Ball” on the streets of London way back in 1851. It was a song about a famous racing horse from Ireland in the late 1700s. The fame of this horse crossed the Atlantic in the early 1800s. Then, enslaved people in the U.S. began singing about it. But they changed the name to “Stewball,” the song Lead Belly later covered.

Taking this concept in another direction, Bragg titles one of his chapters “The Adventures of an Irish Hillbilly.” This was the moniker the press attached to Donegan during his 1957 U.S. tour. But Donegan was actually born in Scotland and raised in England. And the term “Hillbilly” is most likely Scottish in origin. It’s a contraction of “hill-folk” with the slang term “billy,” which meant “friend” or “comrade.” Many of the early settlers of Appalachia were Protestants from Scotland and Northern Ireland. And an alternative etymology for the “billy” portion of the contraction is “Billy Boy.” This meant “a supporter of William of Orange.”

Skiffle As A Form of Youth Rebellion

Skiffle, like Rock and Roll, (and later Punk Rock), inspired a great deal of fear among the older generations. And denigration by the press. There were sensational (and often racist) headlines about riots and mass arrests of kids dancing wildly to “jungle” music. The music, and the cultural milieu it spawned, was confrontational and scornful of mainstream culture. This is understandable in light of the context in which Skiffle emerged. Brits had just spent years living with the fear and privation caused by world war, aerial bombings, and rationing. Much of the privation continued well into the 1950s, producing considerable pent-up frustration and anger amongst the youth.

Priming this youth rebelliousness were other cultural influences, like Spike Milligan’s “Goon Show,” which first aired in 1951. According to Bragg, this show demonstrated the first clear contempt for authority that would come to dominate British youth culture of the 1960s. And there was the Angry Young Men phenomenon. The 1950s playwrights and actors who challenged the status quo with their working-class stories and disdain for the stodgy, stiff upper lip nonsense of the past. So, when this new music arrived that was raw, fast, loud, and fun to dance to, it’s no surprise that the kids went crazy for it.

The Demise of Skiffle

The Skiffle craze only lasted a few years. It was soon supplanted by the early British blues supergroups, like Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies, and John Mayhall. And these would inspire British Invasion bands such as the Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, Kinks, and Animals. And when Skiffle went down, there were plenty of post-mortems and satires. The one I would really like to hear, if I could find an existing recording of it, is Peter Sellers as Lenny Goonigan. He recorded this on his 1959 album “Songs For Swinging Sellers,” which also spoofs Sinatra.