ROOTS, RADICALS & ROCKERS: How Skiffle Changed the World

The stories of the Beatles and the Stones are so familiar that we take it for granted that British kids always played guitars and wrote their own songs. But it was skiffle that put guitars into the hands of the post-war generation, and this well-researched book aims to place that empowering moment in its cultural context, illuminating the period when British jazz-based pop music gave way to music created by teens for teens. The author associates the period after the war with Elvis, Cliff, Tommy Steele, smog, carbolic soap and Izal medicated toilet paper. Then Lonnie Donegan came along with a washboard and kicked off the whole revolution. Tony Donegan, as he was in his early years, started by playing banjo with Chris Barber and his New Orleans jazz band. Back in London with a restyled name after National Service in Vienna, his first solo engagement was described in Melody Maker as a "cowboy-styled blues vocal - really dreadful". Although skiffle emerged from the trad jazz scene, it was never going to be accepted by purists, but soon both Ken Colyer's legendary Jazzmen and its offshoot the Chris Barber Jazz Band were recording skiffle. In 1955 "Rock Island Line" was Donegan's most iconic hit at a time when the word "rock" in a title was a guarantee of cool. Sales of guitars rocketed from 5000 to 250,000 a year. Against a backdrop of the Cold War politics, rock'n'roll riots and a new and a newly assertive working class youth, Billy Bragg charts for the first time in depth the history and impact of the legacy of Britain's original pop movement. It's a story of jazz pilgrims and Blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthyite witch hunts who sparked between them a revolution that shaped pop culture. The 1958 musical Expresso Bongo was a snapshot of the moment when the British musical scene moved from adults to teens. When the Beatles topped the charts in 1964 their drummer Ringo Starr had a background in skiffle, and the same was true of members of the Animals, Manfred Mann, Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman's Hermits and Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, while Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin had played in a skiffle group aged 13. Skiffle led the kids out of post-war austerity to create some of the best pop, rock and folk music of the following decades. 431 pages, photos.