Although it had emerged from their scene, skiffle was never going to be welcomed by the hardcore fans of trad jazz. They took great pride in adhering to what they perceived to be the tenets of New Orleans style and were dismissive of anything that smacked of commerciality. The popular success of ‘Rock Island Line’ and the elevation of Lonnie Donegan – one of their own – to the pop charts only served to exacerbate their prejudices. In April 1956, Jazz Journal gave Graham Boatfield a whole page in which to vent his spleen in an article entitled ‘Skiffle Artificial’.
‘The fact that records by English “skiffle” groups, so-called, are popular enough to merit performance on BBC request programmes’, Boatfield declared, ‘makes it necessary for us to look more closely at this phenomenon.’ Clearly, he felt these kids demanding to hear skiffle on the radio didn’t know what they were doing. After stating that he finds the experience of listening to skiffle ‘painful in the extreme’, he dismisses Ken Colyer’s group as sounding like ‘a bankrupt pier-show of black-faced minstrels’. Lonnie Donegan fares even worse, Boatfield deriding his records as giving the impression of ‘a number of intoxicated hillbillies returning from some over-lengthy orgy’. He goes on to outline an argument that would find a pernicious echo in some purist quarters of the 60s folk revival, namely the notion that you shouldn’t sing songs that don’t come from your own local traditions. ‘London voices, probably best naturally employed in singing “Knees Up Mother Brown” are not quite happy singing “Midnight Special”.’
At a time when vintage jazz records were hard to come by in the UK, trad jazz critics took on the role of a priesthood, custodians and defenders of a high musical culture that could be enjoyed by mere mortals, but not fully appreciated without priestly intercession. Yet Boatfield was right to be concerned. Within a decade, those kids who were requesting skiffle on the BBC would come to dominate the airwaves and consign trad jazz to the margins.
Not every music journalist was as snotty about skiffle. Music Mirror covered jazz from the more popular end. Among the reviews and interviews, it carried articles that explained how to get the best from the newfangled hi-fi equipment that was coming onto the market (the answer was to build it yourself). Other pieces explained the difference between Dixieland jazz and the New Orleans variety, something that would never need to be explained to the more highbrow readers of Jazz Journal.
In February 1956, Music Mirror ran a substantial article about skiffle, written and illustrated by Paul Oliver, a twenty-eight-year-old art teacher at Harrow County School for Boys, in the north-western suburbs of London. Oliver would go on to become a leading authority on the blues and his obvious enthusiasm for African American music is tangible in everything he wrote. Rather than dismiss skiffle as disrespectful and derivative, he saw the sudden popularity of ‘Rock Island Line’ as an opportunity to introduce young listeners to the blues.
He begins by correctly identifying skiffle as ‘a phenomenon almost exclusively of the British jazz world’. Recognising that there have been American artists who have used the word, he goes on to observe that ‘one can look in vain in the American jazz magazines for the equivalent of “Europe’s only Skiffle & Blues Club”. The American jazz club or concert does not feature a “skiffle session” halfway through the programme, but the time appears to be fast approaching when the popularity of a jazz club will largely depend on the inclusion of a “Skiffle Group”. Turning to the standard histories of jazz and their derivatives is unlikely to help one understand the meaning of this branch of jazz, for neither the music nor even the word “skiffle” appears in any of them.’
Like a good teacher, Oliver explores the way that the term ‘skiffle’ was used during the 1920s and 30s, noting that it was never attached to any combination of musicians that resembled Lonnie Donegan’s Skiffle Group. Furthermore, he finds it doubtful if terms such as ‘skiffle music’ were ever in use in the African American community, as the music was simply a part of their social environment and didn’t require a specific label to identify it.
‘It is only now, when jazz has become a self-conscious minor art form with exponents rather touchy about any disrespect for it, that labels and classifications become necessary. So the “skiffle band” has been born: not to provide background music to an uninhibited party, but as a specially featured instrumental group which has a faint link with the “jook bands” of Mississippi in its constitution, but includes in its repertoire folk songs, work songs, spirituals, gospel songs and the blues of the American Negro, with white folk tunes and hobo songs added for good measure.’
It’s clear from this article that Paul Oliver knows exactly what he is listening to, and although he repeats many of Graham Boatfield’s criticisms of Colyer’s and Donegan’s recordings, there is no condescension in his comments. Rather, he sees the popularity of skiffle as a means to an end: skiffle groups ‘have inspired in many jazz enthusiasts an interest and an appetite for the more primitive and most authentic of American musical forms. It is up to the record companies now to meet this interest and potential market to the benefit of themselves, collectors – and the skiffle groups.’
The success of ‘Rock Island Line’ meant Donegan was suddenly in demand as a solo performer. When playing with the Barber band, his lack of musical training was no hindrance, as most trad jazzers played by ear. Artists booked to sing on Cyril Stapleton’s popular radio show, however, were expected to turn up with the sheet music of their big hit so that the BBC Show Band could reproduce the arrangement heard on record. Donegan had no such thing and when asked to write out a simple chart for the musicians to follow, he had to admit that he couldn’t read music.
His embarrassment was saved by the band’s guitarist, who stepped in to help out. Bert Weedon had been playing guitar since before the war and would later gain fame and fortune selling his Play in a Day guitar tutorial to a generation of kids inspired by Lonnie Donegan. He recognised that skiffle marked a sea change in the way people would think of the guitarist. ‘Congratulations,’ he told Donegan. ‘You’re the first man to have made any money out of the guitar. Bloody well done!’
Donegan’s sudden success kept him busy in the recording studio, cutting three tracks on 11 January 1956 for a new EP entitled Skiffle Session, with a band that featured Dickie Bishop on vocals and guitar, Chris Barber on bass and Ron Bowden on drums. The session was supervised by Denis Preston, who had been smart enough to sign Donegan to a personal contract when he cut the Backstairs Session EP for Polygon Records’ Jazz Today imprint the previous summer. Since then, the label had undergone a significant expansion that would make it one of the major players in the following decade.
Pye Ltd had been manufacturing radio equipment in Cambridge since 1896. Their technical prowess was such that they provided the wireless receivers for the first radio broadcasts made by the BBC in 1922. In the years since the war, they had become the premier provider of radio equipment in the UK. In 1953, they were approached by Nixa Records, an independent label that specialised in European pop. Having recently expanded their business to include classical music, Nixa were looking for a partner to provide funds for expansion, and in 1953 Pye bought a controlling share of the business to create the Pye Nixa label.
Around the same time, Polygon Records finally managed to chart one of Petula Clark’s singles, at the eighteenth attempt. ‘The Little Shoemaker’ reached number seven, but as often happens, this success only served to illustrate the limitations of Polygon’s independent operations. Clark released another eight singles in the following two years, but none matched the success of ‘The Little Shoemaker’. The owners of the label, Clark’s father Leslie and her producer, Alan A. Freeman, decided they needed to be part of a larger operation, and in 1955 they joined forces with Pye Nixa. Petula Clark’s next single, ‘Suddenly There’s a Valley’, reached the Top Ten, beginning a decade of success for the artist.
As part of the Polygon deal, Pye Nixa acquired the rights to Denis Preston’s Jazz Today imprint, which included the Chris Barber Jazz Band and their banjo player, Lonnie Donegan. Whether Pye were aware that the trad jazz banjo player they now had under contract would go on to become one of the label’s top-selling artists is questionable. When Jim Irvin was compiling the sleeve notes for a Pye Records retrospective, a former employee confided that it was an enormous stroke of luck that Donegan ended up on their roster.
Such was the career of Lonnie Donegan. No record company A & R man had come to him offering a lucrative contract to record some of that amazing skiffle music because they believed it would be huge. He’d accidentally recorded a hit single and now had been inadvertently signed up by a major record label. After years of plunking away in the back rooms of pubs up and down the country, he’d become an overnight sensation and everybody wanted to hear what he was going to do next.
The first Lonnie Donegan record to appear on the Pye Nixa label was a reissue of the Backstairs Session EP, rushed out in February 1956. It featured the same picture sleeve as the version put out some five months before, but the words ‘Jazz Today’ had been replaced by the Nixa logo. This subtle shift failed to entice the public and, like Decca’s attempt to cash in on Donegan’s sudden success, the record didn’t chart.
This appears to have spooked the label as they put the planned Skiffle Session EP on hold. Someone decided that the best way to follow ‘Rock Island Line’ was with another song from Lead Belly’s repertoire that began with a spoken introduction. Thus Donegan’s next single began, ‘Now this here’s a story about a racehorse called Stewball. Now Stewball was born down in California and when I was down there the other day, the jockeys was telling me they don’t think it’s an ordinary horse at all, in fact they all say it blew there in a storm.’ No ordinary horse is right: when Donegan recorded that introduction, Stewball was already over two hundred years old.
Long before the pop single was invented, songwriters hit on a way of making money by printing topical lyrics to familiar tunes and selling them on the streets. Funny, ribald, satirical, political, these broadside ballads were hugely popular in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, part of an anarchic literary subculture that thrived in the years before the Industrial Revolution.
During the 1840s, when millions were leaving Britain and Ireland for America, Henry Mayhew studied the working lives of the lower classes of London in a series of newspaper articles. In London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851, he described the various hawkers selling printed ballads on the streets of the city. There were ‘long song sellers’, who sold sheets three feet long, with songs printed in three columns, crying, ‘Three yards for a penny’; pinners-up, who displayed their wares pinned to a wall; and, most numerous of all, the chaunters, who sang the ballads they were selling. Mayhew noted that this latter group often sang political or sporting songs, sometimes referring to events that had happened that very day.
Later English Broadside Ballads, published in 1975, contains a song entitled ‘Scew Ball’, which begins:
Come gentleman sportsman I pray listen all
I will sing you a song in praise of Scew Ball
And how he came over you shall understand
It was by Squire Merwin, the pearl of our land
And of his late actions that I’ve heard before
He was lately challeng’d by one Sir Ralph Gore
For five hundred guineas on the plains of Kildare
To run with Miss Sportly, that charming grey mare.
Over eleven verses, the ballad tells the story of a racehorse that converses with its owner, telling him to venture thousands of pounds in wagers, for he will definitely win the race. While the talking horse is clearly poetic licence, the song is based on historical events.
‘Skewbald’ is an old English word describing horses of a chestnut or bay colour which also have white patches in their coat, and records show that a horse of that name began racing in England in 1743. Merwin and Gore were well-known figures in Irish society and both served as president of the Irish Jockey Club. In 1752, the London Evening Post carried the following report: ‘On Monday last the Races began at the Curragh of Kildare, when the grand match for £300 between Sir Ralph Gore’s Grey Mare and Arthur Mervin Esqr.’s horse, Scuball, was run which was won with great ease by the latter.’
By 1829, Scewball’s fame had crossed the Atlantic, with printed copies of the ballad appearing in US cities. Slaves working on the plantations created their own version, relocating the story to their own locale and changing the horse’s name to Stewball. In 1934, John and Alan Lomax, collecting prison songs in the southern states, found ‘it is the most widely known of the chain-gang songs in the states we visited and by far the most constant as to tune and words’.
Lead Belly recorded ‘Stewball’ in New York City in 1946, backed by Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston, performing the song as it would have been heard on the prison farm, call-and-response style. It was this version that provided the template for Donegan’s take on the song, and given that his mother came from Ireland, Lonnie could make some ancestral claim to it.
Still a member of the Chris Barber Jazz Band when he recorded ‘Stewball’ on 20 February 1956, Donegan called upon his bandmates to back him in the studio. Barber once again picked up the double bass, Dickie Bishop played guitar and sang back-up, with Ron Bowden on drums.
‘Stewball’ begins with a jaunty rhythm, gaining in intensity as the song progresses. As with ‘Rock Island Line’, the guitars are strummed frantically while the bass provides the musicality. The addition of drums was the first clear sign that Donegan wasn’t a purist like Colyer. Lead Belly never used a drummer, nor did Woody Guthrie, but if Donegan wanted to compete in the pop charts, he needed the sonic attack that a full drum kit can provide.
For Ron Bowden, that transition was a breeze. ‘It was terrific being on those records. I can’t remember any hassle about the session at all. My part certainly was very straightforward, but Lonnie gave his all, all the time. He worked bloody hard when he was on stage and he was always pushing the tempos.’
For the flip side, Chris Barber suggested ‘Long Gone Lost John’, originally recorded in 1928 for Paramount by Papa Charlie Jackson. Born in New Orleans in 1887, Jackson was the first self-accompanied blues musician to release a record. As Donegan explains in the now standard spoken intro, this here’s the story of an escaped convict. Donegan shortened the title to ‘Lost John’, extended the refrain and added a couplet to the end of the song that said much about his cheeky self-confidence: ‘If anybody asks you who sung the song, tell ’em Lonnie Donegan was here and gone.’
‘Stewball’ was released in April 1956 and was recognised by most reviewers as a worthy follow-up to ‘Rock Island Line’. The jazz critics were still baffled at Donegan’s success. James Asman declared that ‘as a jazz record, it can only be described as phoney’. However, he did have an inkling that there was something going on here, something different from that which had come before. ‘I suspect that this is really a hardworking attempt to recapture the vast record buying public which rushed to the shops for the accidental Decca recording. One must, after all, remember that Donegan is now quite a remarkable figure in the popular field. Tin Pan Alley frankly admits its ignorance to the causes which threw an obscure guitar player in what was originally an amateur revivalist jazz band into the Hit Parade. The ones I talked to last week were completely baffled about the whole business.’
The manner in which Asman refers to ‘Rock Island Line’ as ‘the accidental Decca recording’ is a measure of the shockwave that followed Donegan’s initial entry into the Top Ten. No wonder Tin Pan Alley was baffled. They ran the UK pop industry on the basis that whatever was a hit in the US was likely to be popular in the UK. By paying close attention to the Billboard charts, labels could record versions of American hits by UK artists and get the song in the shops before the original was released here. A huge amount of time and effort went into choosing and promoting the right song, yet along comes this guitar-strumming upstart who picks some obscure folk song from the repertoire of a dead blues singer, and before anyone can say ‘Never tango with an Eskimo’, he’s storming up the charts.
If Tin Pan Alley was stunned by Donegan’s success, what happened next was unprecedented. ‘Rock Island Line’ had been released in America on 6 March, on Decca’s US subsidiary London Records. Ten days later, the NME was declaring that Donegan’s single, ‘already one of the most astonishing phenomena that 1956 is likely to produce … looks like becoming a quick fire sensation in the USA’. The report went on to say that the single had received a tremendous reception from American DJs, selling over two hundred thousand records in the days since its release. A few weeks later, in one of the most audacious examples of selling coals to Newcastle, the NME pop charts page showed ‘Rock Island Line’ entering the US Top Fifteen at number twelve, just as ‘Stewball’ was released in the UK.
The British music industry may have been bemused, but their American counterparts knew a hit when they heard one. Without waiting to discover what it all meant, they moved quickly to grab a slice of the action. When ‘Rock Island Line’ entered the Billboard charts, Mercury Records already had a copycat version in the shops, sung by Len Dreslar. A week later, there were a further four available. Don Cornell, a thirty-five-year-old nightclub singer, cut the song for Coral; Epic released a version by Jimmy Gavin; Merrill Moore, a boogie-woogie country pianist, released an up-tempo version for Capitol; and a nineteen-year-old crooner from the Bronx named Bobby Darin made ‘Rock Island Line’ his debut single. This fevered competition led London Records to place a half-page advert in Billboard declaring that Lonnie’s was ‘the original and hottest record in America’. It didn’t deter the imitators one bit.
As the song climbed the charts, yet more versions appeared, all clamouring for a slice of Donegan’s success. Grandpa Jones, a forty-three-year-old banjo player who appeared in character as an aged old-time musician, released the song on King Records, while Jimmy Work, a cowboy singer in the style of Lefty Frizzell, recorded a version for Dot. Rod McKuen, a poet, songwriter and author who would go on to translate the work of Jacques Brel and write songs for Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, made his recording debut with a version of the song, backed by Rock Murphy and His Rockets.
What is notable about these covers is that all of them repeat Lonnie Donegan’s story about the tollgate outside New Orleans. None have taken their cue from Lead Belly nor gone back to the Library of Congress recordings to hear how it was originally sung by Kelly Pace on the Cummins State Farm. Even Johnny Cash, who opened his first album for Sun Records with ‘Rock Island Line’, repeats Donegan’s intro. Twenty years later at the London Palladium, Cash introduced the song by calling on Lonnie, who was in the audience, to stand up and take a bow. The Man in Black claimed to have recorded his version before Donegan’s, ‘but I guess we didn’t get it played on the right stations’. In fact, it wasn’t until 13 July 1957 that Cash recorded ‘Rock Island Line’ at the Sun Studios in Memphis, over a year after Donegan was in the US Top Ten.
The most intriguing version was released by Stan Freberg ‘and His Sniffle Group’. Freberg was a thirty-year-old satirist who had his own radio show. In the early 50s, he made a career out of poking fun at the hits of the day. His take on ‘Rock Island Line’ also utilises Lonnie’s spoken introduction, to great comic effect. The fact that Freberg coupled his version with a parody of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley says something about the way that Donegan was perceived in the US.
Of these cover versions, only Don Cornell’s made it into the Billboard charts, climbing no higher than fifty-nine. Born Luigi Francisco Varlaro in 1919, Cornell happened to be touring on the British variety circuit as ‘Rock Island Line’ began ascending the American charts. Looking to get some free publicity, Cornell’s manager, the New York impresario Manny Greenfield, concocted stories about the fierce competition between the two versions of the song in the US charts. It was nonsense, of course, but it generated welcome headlines. ‘Don and Donegan are fighting out a record battle over “Rock Island Line”,’ claimed the NME on 16 March.
No doubt seeking to stoke up this ‘rivalry’, Greenfield invited Donegan to the opening night of Cornell’s week at the Finsbury Park Empire. At the after-show reception, Greenfield was astonished to find that Donegan didn’t have any representation in the US. Why would he? He was still technically employed as the banjo player in the Chris Barber Jazz Band. ‘How would you like to go to America?’ asked Greenfield. ‘Who is going to pay the air fare?’ countered Donegan warily. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, I’ll sort it out … just sign here.’
What could Lonnie do? His song was storming up the US charts and now he was being offered the chance to visit the land of his musical heroes. ‘So I signed a contract for American representation, not knowing what the hell it was. Then I went to Chris, who said it was okay, they would get Dickie Bishop to play banjo in the band for a couple of weeks, until I got back.’
Donegan’s timing could not have been better. Just six months earlier, the American Federation of Musicians had finally reached an agreement with the Musicians’ Union to bring to an end the twenty-year embargo on British musicians touring in the US. After intense lobbying by American bandleader Stan Kenton and British counterpart Ted Heath, AFM president James Petrillo agreed to a reciprocal exchange, provided each band only performed full concerts – no club dates nor radio or TV appearances were allowed. Even with these restrictions, this was a victory for the MU, who had been pushing for such a deal since the early 50s. Although initially adopted for a trial period, the reciprocal arrangement, whereby a band wishing to tour the US could only do so if a similar American outfit toured the UK and vice versa, remained in place well into the 1980s.
For British fans of popular music, the news that they would at last be able to see their heroes perform live was cause for celebration. To get some sense of how the average jazz fan must have felt during the two long decades that the ban remained in place, imagine what it would have been like if no American artists had performed in Britain from the time of the skiffle craze to the rise of punk rock, and no British artist had been allowed to tour the US for the same period. No Beatles at Shea Stadium, nor Rolling Stones at Altamont. Jimi Hendrix would never have emerged from the London clubs nor Dylan been heckled at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. With the lifting of this cultural embargo, it felt like jazz had finally been taken off the ration.
Stan Kenton’s West Coast modern swing orchestra were greeted like heroes when they arrived to tour the UK in March 1956, and the music papers were abuzz with rumours of other tours being planned. On 4 May, the NME reported that Louis Armstrong had secured an exchange with Freddy Randall’s trad band, who, it reported, would be joining a rock ’n’ roll package tour through the American south headlined by Bill Haley and His Comets. On the same page it was revealed that negotiations were under way to bring a young singer whom the headline referred to as ‘Elvin Presley’ to the UK. Good luck with that.
A week later, the NME informed its readers that Lonnie Donegan would be leaving for the US on the following Monday, heading for New York and a spot on Perry Como’s TV show, followed by a trip to Cleveland, then considered the rock ’n’ roll capital of America thanks to the work of DJs such as Alan Freed and Bill Randle. The report also broke the news that Donegan had parted company with the Chris Barber Jazz Band.
It was a big call for the banjo player from East Ham. In March 1955, he had married Maureen Tyler. When ‘Rock Island Line’ took off, the couple were expecting their first child, so Donegan asked his boss for a rise. Barber ran the band as a co-operative – everyone got an equal share of the profits – but Donegan felt this just wasn’t fair. Now their audience was full of his fans, paying to hear him sing his hit. Barber stuck to his guns, advising Donegan to think about his long-term security: ‘Jazz is your bread and butter. Skiffle is just the jam.’
With singles in the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic, Donegan knew which side his bread was buttered. He left for America on 14 May 1956, just a month after the birth of his daughter, Fiona.