As someone who experienced the rise of punk rock in late-1970s Britain, as both a fan and a musician, I have always viewed skiffle as a similar phenomenon. Both were movements that came from outside the music industry, breaking down the barrier between performer and audience, eschewing commerciality in favour of a do-it-yourself approach based more on enthusiasm than musical skill. My experiences during the punk rock years gave me an insight into how an egalitarian youth movement could spread from the West End of London out to the suburbs and provinces, empowering those it touched to climb up on stage and make their own music.
However, perspectives on the cultural significance of skiffle were hard to come by in the late twentieth century, when the whole phenomenon was reduced to passing references in the biographies of 1960s rock stars. This was remedied in 1997, when Chas McDevitt published Skiffle: The Definitive Inside Story. McDevitt’s account lived up to its subtitle, his background in jazz giving him insights into the roots of the scene, while his transatlantic success with ‘Freight Train’ allowed him to tell the story of how skiffle tried to come to terms with the pop music of the day.
McDevitt’s book was followed a year later by The Skiffle Craze, written by Mike Dewe. Born in 1940, Dewe was one of the thousands of boys who had been inspired to pick up a guitar by artists like McDevitt, spending their short careers playing intermittently on the local amateur circuit before fading into obscurity. As a result, Dewe’s book is focused on the grass roots, his narrative peppered with ‘skiffle reminiscences’ – panels containing first-hand accounts of skiffle contests and self-made instruments.
I avidly read both books and was pleased to see Van Morrison record the Skiffle Sessions album with Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber in 1998. The English Folk Dance and Song Society invited me to write an article for their house magazine early in the new millennium, and I chose skiffle as my subject. It was in the course of researching that piece that I first grasped the significance of Ken Colyer’s pilgrimage to New Orleans. Speaking to the Ken Colyer Trust, I discovered that one of his original Crane River Jazz Band colleagues, bass player Julian Davies, lived a few miles from me in west Dorset. Julian kindly assented to be interviewed and, over cups of tea in his house in North Allington, he began my education in trad jazz.
Like many brought up on 60s pop music, I regarded trad with contempt. Just as punk was a rejection of the pretentious prog-rock scene, I understood that British beat music – and especially our R & B bands – was a reaction to the trad boom, whose popularity had preceded the appearance of the Beatles and the Stones. It was a prejudice reinforced by seeing the likes of Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball on TV variety shows in the early 70s. Trad seemed backward-looking, middle-aged, square.
Julian changed my perspective. Through his enthusiasm, I came to see trad jazz as a classic ‘back to basics’ movement, akin to what the Ramones and Dr Feelgood were doing in the mid-70s when they stripped the edifice away from rock music, making it exciting again by taking it back to its roots. When, in 2008, I was invited to make a documentary for BBC Radio 4, I chose as my subject the life and legacy of Ken Colyer.
Three years ago, when performing at the Tønder Folk Festival in Denmark, I heard the distinctive sound of what sounded like a skiffle group emanating from the main stage. On investigating, I discovered that it was a performance by the Carolina Chocolate Drops that had caught my ear. The band, consisting of young black musicians, had formed in 2005 to play jazz, blues, folk and country in the African American string band tradition. Not only did they sound like a skiffle group, but their intent seemed to come from a similar place.
A month later, I was in Nashville, Tennessee, as the guest of the Americana Music Association, presenting an award at their annual jamboree. The AMA have done great work over the past few years, nurturing a new scene for younger, edgier bands that don’t fit into country music’s more commercial image. Their notion of what constitutes Americana is broad, encompassing folk, jazz, blues, soul, country and western, rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, zydeco and more.
When I asked them to define this new genre, what I heard immediately made me think of skiffle. According to the AMA, Americana is any contemporary music based on the roots music of the US that lives in a world apart from the pure forms of the genres upon which it draws. Wasn’t that what Lonnie Donegan was creating back in 1954, when he recorded ‘Rock Island Line’? I was so taken with this idea that I returned to my hotel room to dash off a column for the Guardian website claiming that the Brits had invented Americana. Tongue-in-cheek though that argument may have been, my encounters with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the AMA ignited a desire to both explore and relate the back story of skiffle, investigating the forces that had come together to create the cultural space for it to emerge in 1950s Britain.
There is, to my mind, no greater authority on the pop music of this period than Pete Frame, genealogist of British rock music, whose hand-drawn family trees have graced the pages of numerous music magazines since the mid-70s. His magnum opus, The Restless Generation, published in 2007, tells the story of youth culture in the 50s with the forensic detail of one who was there at the time and experienced the great sense of relief as jazz, skiffle, rock ’n’ roll and pop helped a generation of war babies slough off the restricting skin of post-war British society. This was my guiding star in the writing of this book, a constant source of reference, along with the McDevitt and Dewe tomes. Goin’ Home: The Uncompromising Life and Music of Ken Colyer, the definitive biography of the man, written by Mike Pointon and Ray Smith, was a huge help for the early chapters, as was Samuel Charters’s brilliant history of New Orleans jazz, A Trumpet Around the Corner.
I was privileged to speak with a number of skiffle veterans and their family members, who did their best to recall events that happened sixty years ago: Chris Barber, Dickie Bishop, Joe Boyd, Billy Burnette, Shirley Collins, Maureen Donegan, Ron and Claudia Gould, Mick Groves, Ray and Eva Harvey, Fred Hellerman, Brian Jackman, Paul Jones, Chas McDevitt, Pete Maynard, Van Morrison, Dave and Christine Mutton, Richard Preston, Leon Rosselson, Peggy Seeger, June Shelley, Hylda Sims, Ann Sunshine, Norma Waterson, Bob Watson and Martyn Wyndham-Read.
Jeff Place, archivist and curator of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, DC, helped me make sense of Lead Belly’s many recordings of ‘Rock Island Line’. David Nathan and Mike Rose at the National Jazz Archive corresponded with me on Lonnie Donegan’s early involvement with the NFJO. Keith Ames and Karl Magee at the Musicians’ Union and John Williamson at Glasgow University provided valuable background to the AFM/MU ban.
I’m indebted to Ian Anderson, editor of fRoots magazine, for giving me access to the Eric Winter archive that he curates and for allowing me to use a number of images I found there. Laura Smyth at the Vaughn Williams Memorial Library was most helpful on the history of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Rick Blackman was good enough to give me sight of the manuscript for his forthcoming book Forty Miles of Bad Road: SCIF and the Notting Hill Riots and to allow me to cite it as a source for the activities of the Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship. Martyn Colyer, son of Bill, very kindly gave me access to his photo archive and permission to use images.
Paul Adams at Fellside Recordings, who currently release Ken Colyer’s recordings, was a mine of information and contacts, as was skiffle veteran Derek Mason. Cyril Davies’s biographer Todd Allen gave me some background on his subject. Roger Trobridge from the Cyril Davies website put me in touch with Bob Watson and Dickie Bishop. Nora Guthrie hooked me up with Fred Hellerman. Bob Dylan’s bass player Tony Garnier overheard me talking about Lonnie Donegan and told me how Paul Burlison used to wax lyrical about the time the Rock ’n’ Roll Trio backed Lonnie in 1956. Paul kindly put me in touch with Billy Burnette. Peter Donegan arranged for Lonnie’s first wife, Maureen, to speak to me. Ivan Beavis put me in touch with Tom Greenwood, who agreed to let me use photographs taken by his father, Ernie.
Jim Irvin provided some helpful background about the Pye record label. John Harris and Tom Holland were instrumental in pointing me towards some illuminating books. Barb Ingalls kindly did some research for me in Detroit, and Samantha Pearce did a great job in transcribing interviews. I spent a considerable amount of time in the British Library wading through music papers and journals from the 1950s, and the staff there were always helpful.
Among the team at Faber, my editor, Dave Watkins, has been a constant source of support and guidance. Eleanor Rees brought her copy-editing skills to the project, knocking the narrative into shape, and Ian Bahrami was a meticulous proofreader and fact checker. Thanks are also due to Luke Bird, who designed the jacket, Kate Ward, text designer, Dan Papps, who handled the publicity, and Lee Brackstone, publisher of the Faber Social list.
But my biggest debt of gratitude is to my partner, Juliet, without whose love, support and understanding this book would never have been written.