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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:

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:

And it wasn’t just those who were teens in the 1950s who were changed by skiffle. Bragg traces skiffles’ influence into the mid-1970s—when bands with roots in skiffle like the Bee Gees and ABBA finally hit it big, and when young DIY rockers like Dr. Feelgood, the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Clash and the Buzzcocks “with their menacing demeanour and sparse, spiky sound” created their own new sound called punk rock. (p. 391)

Roots, Radicals & Rockers is an act of exploration and gratitude by Billy Bragg to his musical forebears, the people who created the musical atmosphere in which he grew up, found his voice and made his own way. It’s also a lovely example of someone in the last third of his life taking advantage of the opportunities that life has provided him to do something new (write a book), and to do it in a way that pays tribute past generations for the benefit of the generations coming after him.

Crossposted at: https:masscommons.wordpress.com

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