Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World

There’s the world before Lonnie Donegan first recorded and then performed “Rock Island Line” all over Britain and the United States; and there’s the world after Donegan played “Rock Island Line”.

Illuminating those two worlds, how they came to be, and how they are both separated from and linked to each other, is the splendidly accomplished purpose of Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World.

“It was skiffle that put guitars into the hands of the war babies, and this book aims to place that empowering moment in its proper context in our post-war culture, illuminating the period when British pop music, for so long a jazz- based confection aimed at an adult market, was transformed into the guitar-led music for teens that would go on to conquer the world in the 1960s.” (p. xv)

But first you may be wondering: what is skiffle?

The answer depends on where and when you ask. If you’re asking on the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s, a “skiffle” one of several slang terms (also, a “gouge”, a “percolator” or a “boogie”, among others) for a rent party organized by one of the new migrants from the South trying to make ends meet. “(D)uring the years of prohibition, a tenant looking to rustle up a month’s rent would brew up some moonshine liquor, engage the services of a barrelhouse piano player and charge people twenty-five cents for admission.” (p. 92)

However, if you’re in London in the 1950s and trying to figure out what to call that new music played by the guitarist, bass player and washboard/percussionist during a set break in the middle of a traditional jazz band’s performance, you asked Bill Colyer, a musician and proprietor of London’s finest jazz record shop. Colyer (whose brother Ken is the leading English expert/proponent of both traditional New Orleans jazz and this new sound that’s clearly not “jazz” and clearly not like any other music in the British Isles at the time)  digs deep within his voluminous knowledge of American music and tells you it’s “skiffle”, “in an instant (changing) the meaning of the word, from arcane black American slang for a rent party to a contemporary British term describing guitar-led, roots-based music”. (p. 95)

Pete Townshend saw Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen play one of Britain’s first skiffle gigs. “(W)hat made a lasting impression on him was the sight of the guitarist taking control of the gig by bringing his instrument to the front of the stage. In that moment, he grasped the enormity of what was happening. ‘This instrument was going to change the world. For me, this was absolutely massive because my father was a saxophone player. I could see the end of my father’s world—I was going to get this guitar and it was going to be bye-bye, old-timer, and that’s exactly what happened.‘” (p. 90)

As befits a good leftist, Bragg is keenly attuned to the social, political and economic structures that helped produce skiffle in particular and the British youth culture of the 1950s in general. Among them:

   
• the American Federation of Musicians/Musicians Union mutual ban that kept US and English musicians from performing in each others’ countries from the early 1930s well into the 1950s;

   

• the mandatory 18 month national service conscription that affected every young British man from 1948-60;

   

• the explosion of “skiffle bars” in city neighborhoods (20 in Soho alone by 1957) that catered to the growing number of teenagers with disposable income;

   

• the explosion of skiffle groups (an estimated 30-50,000 active in 1957) and their concomitant demand for cheap guitars (“I estimate that this year over a quarter of a million will be imported into the country, compared with about 6,000 in 1950” said the managing director of one of Britain’s largest musical instrument firms in 1956) (p. 303).

In the closing chapters of Roots, Radicals & Rockers Bragg pays off on the bet made by the book’s subtitle, illustrating how skiffle did, in fact, change the world:

   
• Skifflers were there at the founding of what became the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) (p. 348);

   

• Skifflers and rockers took quick and collective action in response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, leading to the creation of the Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship (SCIF), the first of what has become a commonplace reaction over the past two generations by popular musicians and artists in the wake of social, political, economic and natural disasters (p. 354);

   

• One branch of the skiffle movement explored more deeply into the roots of music like “Rock Island Line”, “Midnight Special” and “Frankie and Johnny” and mutated into the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s (p. 362);

   

• Another branch, upon discovering that acoustic guitar player and “folk singer” Muddy Waters of Mississippi in the early 1940s had become the Cadillac-driving electric guitar-playing bluesman of Chicago by the late 1950s, poured themselves into rhythm & blues, and produced the British blues revival of the 1960s (p. 376);

   

• And with the end of national service conscription in 1958, skifflers John, Paul and George from Liverpool spent the next four years furiously working on their craft, finding a drummer and becoming <del>the Blackjacks<del&gt, <del>the Quarrymen</del&gt, <del>Johnny & the Moondogs</del&gt, <del>the Beetles</del&gt, <del>the Silver Beetles</del&gt, <del>the Silver Beatles</del&gt, the Beatles (perhaps you’ve heard of them?)…as did untold thousands of other young men who, no longer being forced to form regiments could now form bands. (p. 387)

Crossposted at: https:masscommons.wordpress.com