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The Lonnigans Skiffle Group
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Credits The following text is taken from the Royal Albert Hall concert brochure titled 'Skiffle - The Roots of British Rock'. Original text by John Pilgrim commissioned by the Lonnigans. Picture Credits. We would like to thank the following contributors: Chas McDevitt, Bill Colyer, Rick Hardy (Richards), John Pilgrim, Dave Illingworth, Mike Platt, Derek Mason, Ron Mason, Dave Peacock, Charles Harris. First published by Square Peg Productions Ltd 1998. All copy, photographs and artwork remains copyright ©1998, the writer, photographer and designer and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without prior permission.
Skiffle - The Roots of British RockINTRODUCTION by Donny Lonnigan If the sound of a ‘Freight Train’, hurtling down the ‘Rock Island Line’, doesn’t conjure up the image of teenagers hop-jiving to the hiss of a Gaggia coffee machine....you were probably born after 1957 and you might be unfamiliar with the term SKIFFLE. I was four years old when the skiffle explosion went boom! My one abiding recollection of the period, is of shards of black shellac littering the living room floor. My brother Johnnie would smash old gramophone records over my head, as we acted out an imaginary bar room brawl from “Wagon Train”. There would be a loud Smash as Don Lang and his ‘Fragmented’ Five were transformed into a million pieces. Lonnie’s “Gambling Man” was the culprit, blaring out from the radiogram and working us up into a frenzy. discs by the Star Gazers and Guy Mitchell went the same way. But, we never touched the skiffle records So who better to explain this musical phenomenon than journalist, broadcaster and musician John Pilgrim. John lived through this period playing with all the biggest names in skiffle. He also helped to shape the music through his work with the influential Vipers Skiffle Group. SKIFFLE - The Roots of British Rock by John Pilgrim Until recently there was little available on the mid-fifties skiffle vogue. There was the Reverend Brian Bird’s instabook of 1957 which I remember, probably unjustly, as a mine of misinformation. There was Paul Adams’ excellent sleevenote to the Fellside Colyer LP The Decca Skiffle Sessions. A few grudging mentions in some of the rock histories and sometimes a truncated film clip of Nancy Whiskey singing Freight Train appeared on the telly. For the most part though there was silence about a movement (or a craze depending on your viewpoint) that revolutionised popular culture and changed many lives (See the short story Skiffle Night by Philip Norman). Even Pete Frame, the great rock historian sometimes tended to write as if skiffle served its purpose by being the entry point into music of rock stars like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Yet skiffle didn’t die suddenly as is commonly supposed. True, it outgrew its original sound and form. It developed, changed, and altered its name to reflect those changes. The country blues revival of the sixties was often (although by no means always) posh skiffle under another name. The popularity of urban electric blues, and the rather more distinctly British contributions to rock ‘n’ roll could not have come about the way they did, or with the people they did, without skiffle. Neither, it is sometimes forgotten, could the folk boom of the time. The sad death of Lal Waterson recently reminded us all of that iconic folk group, The Watersons. They started out as a skiffle group. Many of the most respected names in folk and rock began the same way, as well as some of pop’s senior figures. For example, Kingston’s Bucktown Skiffle Group hasn’t left much of a mark on music history but it had Mick Jagger in it, while The Sputnicks featured a future star by the name of Van Morrison. And everyone knows the ancestry of The Beatles in the Quarrymen Skiffle Group.
However as the late Wally Whyton remarked “There was a lot of things going on in the early fifties and they all tended to be lumped together and called skiffle.” An NBC commentator probably put it best when introducing a programme on that first coals-to-Newcastle tour by Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey. “Originally” he said, “skiffle referred to Chicago rent parties and the music at them was played by jazz and blues musicians. This new skiffle is not like that. It is a sociologist’s nighmare of restless youth, postwar instabilty, and cultural cross breeding”. Well. Not many people know that. The new skiffle did much more than refocus attention on the associated musics of jazz and blues, prominent though that strand was. It was also a burst of eclecticism only possible in an age of mechanical reproduction. The skifflers via records and tapes, took songs from America, it’s true, but also from the West Indies, from Ireland, from Australia, from 18th Century England. Skiffle restored the concept of people making music for themselves in a world where they were supposed to be passive consumers of a conveyor belt product (the nadir was probably How Much is that Doggie in the Window). The result was an eruption of amateur music making that with all its technical limtitations, musical inexperience, and cultural innocence created a number of different streams which became the sixties explosion of new ideas in popular music. We are still living with the revolution that skiffle created. Now we seem to have come full-circle as over-specialisation has separated out blues, jazz, folk and pop into different audiences. Pop in particular has again become technology and hype dependent. Popular music in general is once more tending to be a passive rather than a participatory experience. Yet people still like to sing even if much popular music gives them little opportunity. So perhaps we are due for a new skiffle revolution to bring back, as it did before, a concept of music as something that everyone does. The packed audience roaring out the choruses at the 1997 skiffle reunion at the 100 Club suggested this is so. Today bands like John Wall’s Kansas City Moaners, The Lonnigans, Reet Petite & Gone, and Railroad Bill are signposts - to what? The following is a brief sketch of what happened last time. The future lies ahead. British skiffle is usually seen as a product of the New Orleans jazz revival and the interest in earlier forms of black music and entertainment that it engendered. The line is traced back to Barber and Donegan, who were to have hits, and Ken Colyer whose music has lasted best over the years. History though is never as simple as that.
Ken Colyer and Lonnie Donegan Both Chas McDevitt and Mike Dewe, in their recent books associate the term with the black urban rent parties of the twenties, and find that it is usually applied to the event rather than the music. A skiffle was a party given for the purpose of raising the rent, with impromptu music, usually based around a piano or a couple of guitars. It was also known, deliciously, as a “percolator”. Dan Burley, respected editor of the Amsterdam News, recalled his days as a blues and boogie pianist in a session for Circle records. He brought in New Orleans bass player, Pops Foster, and Brownie and Sticks McGhee on guitars, and called the group Dan Burley’s Skiffle Boys. It was this album that bass player Mickey Ashman found and played to Johnny Parker on a trip to Switzerland with Humphrey Lyttleton in 1951. Intrigued by this sort of blues/barrelhouse music, pianist Johnny Parker formed a similar group within the Humphrey Lyttleton Band which Humph used to announce as Johnny Parker’s Skiffle. Later he ran an impromptu music night at the Latin Quarter Club in Soho, Johnny Parker’s Skiffle Night. All sorts of musicians sat in on this blues and barrelhouse based jam session including three who became prominent when skiffle took off. One was an enthusiastic disciple of Django Reinhardt, Diz Disley. Disley was later to work with Ken Colyer, Bob Cort, and Nancy Whiskey. Beryl Bryden was there as she was everywhere at that time, and her own Backroom Boys had featured Johnny Parker. Theodore Bikel turned up from time to time. Mickey Ashman was usually on bass and sometimes a callow washboard player would nervously take advantage of both Disley and Parker’s tolerant attitude to beginners. His name was John Pilgrim. Parker’s Skiffle Night didn’t last for long and perhaps because of this has somehow eluded music historians. Nevertheless it was the first music regularly played as skiffle in Britain, beating Chris Barber by a few months.
Bill Colyer Somehow the very word seemed to be in the air. Chris Barber derived his use of the term from a nineteen-twenties 78 rpm Paramount blues sampler called Hometown Skiffle. He recalls playing Midnight Special with a trio from his amateur band, including Donegan in 1952. “We didn’t” he says, “call ourselves a skiffle group but we did vaguely refer to the music as skiffle”. Later when joined by Ken Colyer they did songs culled from Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly or the Memphis Jug Band. Bill Colyer on washboard joined Chris on bass to become the rhythm section of this new band within a band. Earlier the Crane River Band had also featured Ken Colyer on trumpet and also had a unit within the band. As Paul Adams states on his sleeve note for the Decca Skiffle Sessions the aim at this time was quite overtly educational - to teach a presumably unknowing audience about some of the influences on jazz. Then Ken went back to sea, jumped ship to get to New Orleans, and returned from a New Orleans nick a hero. Taking over as leader of a band co-operative (which included Chris Barber, Monty Sunshine and Tony Donegan) Ken made the New Orleans to London album. In spite of his newly acquired collection of Leadbelly 78s, that LP was a skiffle-free zone, although the band had been featuring skiffle in its club appearances at the time. The next LP, New Orleans Joys, had two skiffle classics, John Henry and that classic sleeper Rock Island Line, featuring a renamed Tony, now “Lonnie” Donegan. Rock Island Line, with Beryl Bryden on washboard, was a performance that was eventually to take skiffle into the charts.
Cliff backstage at the 2i's But that was after Ken had left. Without a regular band he took a room in Johnny Parker’s house and the two of them started some informal skiffle sessions. Mickey Ashman joined on bass and the idea was incorporated into the band Ken gradually pieced together at this time. At that time it was known as ‘the breakdown group’. Later, Bill Colyer suggested that ‘skiffle group’ would mean more, and under this title it recorded the first British skiffle tracks 25 June 1954. The personnel was Ken himself, Alexis Korner - guitar and mandolin, Diz Disley - National steel guitar#, Mickey Ashman - bass and Bill Colyer - washboard. Johnny Parker was still with Humphrey Lyttleton and never managed to record with the group he, Mickey and Ken had initiated. They worked without a piano until the advent of Bob Kelly. Three tracks were recorded that day. The first was to become something of an anthem for skiffle, Midnight Special. The remaining tracks were Casey Jones and K.C. Moan. All Ken Colyer’s skiffle sides for Decca have been collected on Lake LA 5007 - forty years on they are still charming and intriguing listening. There is something about Ken Colyer’s voice, as there is about his trumpet playing, that is, to quote Paul Adams, “unnervingly authentic”. Outside of London the main band to feature a skiffle group was Ray Bush’s Avon Cities Jazz Band. They recorded as a skiffle group in 1956 for Tempo but never really got the distribution and recognition they deserved although the skiffle group was a big hit with the band’s public. It is therefore good news that some of their tapes have just been issued by Rollercoaster Records.
Most of the skiffle groups from these early years came out of jazz bands. Like Johnny Duncan, Dickie Bishop came from the Barber band, and had as his drummer, Stan Belwood from the Mick Mulligan Band. Dickie himself later joined up with Kenny Ball as skiffle began to drop out of favour. Having a background in country music, his group, The Sidekicks, placed some emphasis on the songs of Woody Guthrie. Bob Cort started in dixieland bands before moving into folk and cabaret and usually worked with a jazz oriented personnel. Ken Sykora, Neville Skrimshire, and Diz Disley were all involved with the Cort group at one time or another. The late Beryl Bryden, washboard player behind Donegan on that first skiffle hit Rock Island Line, worked most of her life as a jazz and blues singer but started playing the washboard in 1948. A portent of the future can be spotted in the personnel of her fifties band, Beryl Bryden’s Backroom Boys, which included Cyril Davies’ 12 string guitar and harmonica, and Alexis Korner on guitar.
Alexis Korner Along with Donegan’s Rock Island Line the record most associated in the general public’s mind with skiffle is Chas McDevitt’s Freight Train, with Nancy Whiskey. Nancy’s background was in folk (she had already recorded for Topic) but Chas started musical life with the High Curley Stompers in Camberley and by 1955 had moved on to the Crane River Jazz Band forming his first skiffle group within that band the following year. Only the Vipers, alone among what Mike Dewe, in The Skiffle Craze, calls The Big Four, were not directly involved in jazz. Even with them though, the bass player, Tony Tolhurst, came from a big band background, while Wally Whyton and myself had both been jazz and blues record collectors for many years. There was even a time when we had to keep quiet about our Charlie Parker collections because of the warring camps into which jazz was divided in those days. Skiffle then had its origins in the jug, washboard and blues groups of the twenties and thirties and the informal guitar and piano groups associated with the rent party. Although jazz musicians came to deride it (both New Orleans revivalists and modern jazzers were deeply suspicious of anything popular) many of them, Disley, Sykora, the Colyer brothers, Bill Bramwell, Denny Wright, Ray Bush, Neville Skrimshire, Graeme Bell, played skiffle and shared responsibility for moving popular music into a different mode. If it came to sound quite different from the black American music of the original model, that was inevitable, particularly when a fresh generation of amateurs decided they wanted to play music not just listen to others. It is difficult to appreciate today the extent to which early post war Britain, at least in the south, was musically barren. There was little popular music making at all. Music was provided by a class of professional musicians and the idea of music as something people did for themselves was almost totally absent.
Dave Peacock (Chas & Dave) So someone sitting in a coffee house with a guitar was a source of wonder and delight in this musically undernourished world. The two-and-a- half-minute 78rpm record was still the main medium for recorded music. There were no independent or local radio stations. There were no folk clubs to speak of (except perhaps the Topic in Bradford) and blues clubs were unheard of. If you had a musical education it was classical. If you wanted to play jazz you went into the commercial dance bands and played jazz after hours. This began to change in the late forties and early fifties. The New Orleans jazz revival had provided one source of amateur enthusiasm and from this had come both skiffle and the early members of the blues public. The odd guitar was appearing, and those owning them were beginning to look for more interesting material than How Much is that Doggie in the Window? From this, and from the propagandist efforts of people like Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd came the early stirrings of support for a folk revival. Skiffle was an essential part of that revival, as former Vipers’ fans Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick testify. The main source of material was still gramophone records ill-digested, barely audible, and only half understood most of the time. On them could be heard (only just heard, in some cases) Leadbelly, Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, and Burl Ives, occasionally an Irish folk item, or Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston.
Diz Disley Out of this musical desert, lurching from the oasis of a Big Bill Broonzy visit to a Leadbelly import from Dobell’s Record Shop, came the Vipers. By today’s standards best categorised as punk folk, the group heard on record was the group you saw at the Two I’s. What the Vipers played wasn’t copied from anywhere but gouged out of limited techniques infused with a desire to make music. Through sheer ignorance and enthusiasm The Vipers created a fresh style that owed little to the jazz based groups except its hard drive. It was this that seemed to have made such an impact on younger players. Two of those early fans were Jet Harris and Hank Marvin. They joined the Vipers Mk 3 as players, went on to become The Drifters, and finally with Tony Meehan another ex-Viper, The Shadows. With Donegan, people remember his dynamic personality in performance. With Chas McDevitt, people remembered tunes and arrangements and charm. With the Vipers, it was the raw energy and attack, the ‘unbridled aggression’ that stayed in the minds of those who started as fans and were later to surpass us. A Soho Fair van tour brought the three singers (Wally Whyton, Johnny Martyn and Jean van den Bosch) accidentally to the Two I’s. People started to crowd in. Tony Tolhurst and myself moved from sitters-in to permanent chairs by which time people were queuing round the block. That was the band that appeared on the Parlophone records, and on the new LP of unreleased material on the Rollercoaster album Skiffling Along with the Vipers.
Wee Willie Harris and Wally Whyton Starting at the Breadbasket and moving to the Two I’s, The Vipers were the first coffee house group to gain a public. All over London, though, there were groups of singer/instrumentalists, usually guitar based, and it was a matter of chance which of these swirling inchoate aggregations of players made the first breakthrough. Skiffle and the coffee bar became popular together. For a brief while in 1956 almost every Soho coffee bar and delicatessen seemed to sprout some sort of band or group. One Old Compton Street deli was Orlando’s, managed by a man known as Johnny the Pole. At seven every evening Johnny would take the salami out of the window, clear the daytime food counter, and put on it whatever musicians turned up. Most of the names in skiffle jammed there. Tommy Steele, Redd Sullivan and Mike Pratt - then running the Cottonpickers, Tony Kohn who was to join Chas McDevitt and the near mythical Red Nerk. It was Nerk, now the respectable Ron Gould, who reminded me that when the mood took him Johnny The Pole would get on his counter and recite Chekov’s The Bespoke Overcoat. And the crowd would listen and applaud too.
Chas McDevitt Group Music seemed to be emerging out of every window - the excitement was palpable. Then the Russians moved into Hungary, and in pale emulation the authorities in Britain decided that too many people were enjoying themselves for nothing. So they clamped down on the most innocent part of Soho. Johnny The Pole’s splendidly anarchic sessions were closed down, as were The Prego’s a few yards along, and many others on various pretexts. Soho’s brief period as a wide open music area ended. It was a genuine entertainment revolution that didn’t involve crime, sex, or drugs. What probably bothered the powers-that-be was that nobody appeared to be making money out of it. This was probably skiffle’s most creative period when all the essential cross-fertilisations took place, when the rock stars of later years were part of the audience for skiffle. However the Two I’s weathered this particular storm, as did the seminal Gyre and Gimble, and the equally seminal Nucleus, both of them just outside Soho proper. The “improvised” venues disappeared, but the professional ones, coffee houses with space usually, kept going. The Gyre and Gimble had always had a guitar club with Disley, Jean Van den Bosch, Tommy Steele and Johnny Booker - it served in fact as Booker’s headquarters. So the Gyre and Gimble became the centre of skiffle’s folk, ballad and rock input. The Nucleus on the other hand retained a wide open policy. You might hear some of the most experimental modern jazz in Britain in the small hours of the morning with a Russell Quaye spasm band playing between sets. Like the Gyre and Gimble, it was a place where the musicians went to play and the most wildly disparate styles and abilities came together. Nowhere else in Britain could you have heard modern jazz’s Malcom Cecil playing bass with Mike Pratt’s Cotton Pickers. Or West Indian bop and free form pioneer, Joe Harriott, his alto backed by John Pilgrim’s washboard and Bo Bo Buquet’s cheesebox bass. They listened to each other with awe on the one hand or amusement on the other, but they listened. And holding the fort on many evenings was a young unassuming guitar genius who amazed everyone, folkies, jazzers, and skifflers. His name was Davey Graham. Now he is legend.
Saxons Skiffle Group While feeding a constant supply of new arrivals and new ideas into popular music, neither place achieved fame at the time as a venue. The Two I’s however became something of a starmaking factory for those who followed. Tommy Steele had already arrived, but as Chas McDevitt says in his book, “Les Hobeaux, The Worried Men, Adam Faith, Terry Dene, Wee Willie Harris, Joe Brown, Vince Taylor, Tony Sheridan - together with the televising of the Six-Five Special from the premises - all helped place the Two I’s in an unassailable position”. Later of course, Harry Webb and the Drifters started a residency and became Cliff Richard and the Drifters. It is not unreasonable to see that with the success of Cliff Richard, skiffle’s progeny had become the sort of show business draw that skifflers had originally rejected. Unlike the Gyre and Gimble or the Nucleus, the Two I’s wasn’t a place where musicians went to play for experiment or relaxation. Made famous by a then unknown band, it now made unknown bands famous. It was a far cry from the bare cellar where the Vipers had passed round a hat. As the nursery of British rock its reign ended when new clubs like the Marquee, with their greater capacity, gave the new rock and blues pioneers a chance to reach bigger audiences. Without it though the history of popular music in Britain would be very different. As Tommy Steele pointed out it was at the Two I’s that he first sang Blue Suede Shoes, learned from sheet music bought in New York. “The first time”, he reckons “rock ‘n’ roll was heard in England.” Perhaps Chas McDevitt, so perspicacious in many ways, didn’t realise the heroic era of coffee bars was drawing to its close when he opened the Freight Train in 1958. The Freight Train played its own role in music history though, before the juke box replaced the jam session. With Disley and Les Bennetts jamming there in the small hours there were memorable sessions. It became the meeting point for bands going to or returning from gigs. And the Heath/Gregg collaboration, “Shakin all over” was written in its unused basement. Most of all it made Chas McDevitt poor and that’s why he’s still working today. Just as the Two I’s gives us the transformation of young skiffle fans into the new rock stars so the success of Six-Five Special gives us the moment when the media accepted that there was a young music market that had its own ideas about what it wanted to hear. Earlier attempts were less successful. The Vipers recall a TV show with a churlish Jack Payne who said that he didn’t like skiffle and didn’t know why the Vipers were there. Neither apparently did the set designers. Placed on individual cubes yards apart the Vipers were unable to hear each other, with predictably chaotic results. Only Jack Payne was pleased with the result. Conservative attitudes in the BBC hierarchy frequently meant the ignoring of new trends. Chris Barber used to say that it took the success of the New Orleans jazz revival to get big band leader Ted Heath a radio series. So skiffle came late to radio and television. There is no television record of that earlier musical ferment in Soho that ended as the tanks moved into Budapest. The Vipers were filmed at the Two I’s but the programme was cut to a couple of minutes because of that same invasion. The tape was destroyed. The splendidly televisual City Ramblers were filmed at least twice but the films seem not to have been transmitted and the tapes have never been located. The same sort of thing happened on radio. With all its timidity and tendency to patronise, Saturday Skiffle Club’s audience was pushing three million at its peak and had an astonishingly large percentage of the available audience (only beaten by Ted Heath and Victor Sylvester {!!!} according to Mike Dewe.) Yet this was not felt to be of real value, and these tapes too were wiped. By the time the Beatles came along the Beeb seemed to have learned its lesson, but it is unfortunate that musical documentation of this period is lacking#. The easily available tape recorder was still a little way ahead. Saturday Skiffle Club, for all its success, was never an exclusively skiffle programme. Nervous of such commitment to a new phenomenon, the BBC had always put in jazz pianists, guitarists, and singers to lend weight. As these included Dill Jones, Johnny Parker and Ken Sykora, most of us didn’t complain at the time. Later, folk and ethnic music was introduced as, with the apparent decline of skiffle, the programme split, amoeba like, into Saturday Club and Ken Sykora’s Guitar Club. Nevertheless, the programme was, for the BBC, a bold and successful experiment. From it came the two-hour Saturday Club, its first programme featuring Terry Dene, Russell Quaye, and Johnny Duncan representing those associated with skiffle. Other programmes featured Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard, Pete Curtis, Marty Wilde and Steve Benbow. Saturday Club continued to feature skiffle even if it no longer emphasised the name, and in combination with the emerging British rock scene prepared a new audience for the advent of the Beatles. Skiffle appeared from time to time on other programmes and specials particularly Guitar Club. However television was now becoming more important. There were isolated shows - those with Lonnie were always a success - but occasionally lack of understanding made things difficult. The Vipers remember one show which featured The John Dankworth Big Band, The Humphrey Lyttleton Band, Big Bill Broonzy, and The Vipers. “Everybody concerned knew we were outclassed” said one of the group. “but it gave us the opportunity to spend the afternoon with Broonzy.” Six-Five Special may not have completely ended this lack of understanding about what was appropriate for a youthful audience but neither did it patronise. Going out live with the jiving audience as part of the show, it changed the way popular music was presented. There was a now famous telecast from the Two I’s with Don Lang. Chas McDevitt, Wee Willie Harris and the Worried Men among others, but even when the show went out from the studio it made enormous efforts to appear like a spontaneous location shoot. It was an enormous success, with a massive viewing figure of four and a half million, quite unprecedented for the time. Many now famous pop names appeared on the show, with Donegan being particularly successful, but it’s worth noting at this point that Derek Mason, now on washboard with The Lonnigans, first appeared on the Six-five Special with the New Station Skiffle Group. Six-Five Special was important in other ways too. It took what had been a minority cult with a degree of teenage appeal, and spread its influence to young people at large. So British skiffle performers became familiar names to many who had no real interest in Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy or the musics that went into the making of jazz. From this point, skiffle was a pop phenomenon and its roots in black American music ceased to be as important as its role as the progenitor of the British pop scene. Here it gave many young musicians a chance to strut their stuff. The featuring of Stanley Dale’s National Skiffle Contest was one important element but even without this, the Six-Five Special remains the most influential of the screen shows of the time. There were one or two films that involved skiffle or skiffle performers. The Tommy Steele Story featured Chas McDevitt. The Golden Disc, a vehicle for Terry Dene, featured Nancy Whiskey backed by Sonny Stewart’s Skiffle Kings, and Les Hobeaux, while a film of Six-Five Special featured the ubiquitous Donegan performing two numbers with his usual verve. Those three productions apart, the film industry woke up to skiffle too late to successfully utilise its drive and energy. It was the frequently maligned BBC that led the way. If the Beeb missed that fertile early period, well, so did everyone else. They certainly picked up the baton as skiffle began to get popular and it was a former Six-Five Special producer, Jack Good who produced Oh Boy when the second wave of skifflers began to create a distinctively British pop sound. By the time Six-Five Special was establishing skiffle with a non specialist audience, the old fashioned talent contest had been colonised and given a new lease of life in the form of the skiffle contest. How far the competitions were genuine and how far they were a ruse by promoters to get performers on the cheap is arguable but there is no doubt their effectiveness. A group with five or six members, good family relationships, and a local following could ensure sixty or more seats would be occupied. Wally Whyton remembered one promoter ordering them to let through Group X “they’ve brought three coach loads of supporters”. This however was when the appeal of the headline groups was beginning to fade and the competitions were beginning to serve as a boost for falling box office receipts. There is no way of generalising about most of these contests. They were too widespread and varied. Some were local and some national. Some were open to all comers, some placed strict limits on what could be played or who could enter. Some honoured their commitments to specific prizes. Others never managed to reach the final where the prizes were to be awarded. Stanley Dale’s National Skiffle contest, despite being tied in with a Jim Dale/Vipers tour that hit most major cities, fizzled out without any formal conclusion, although a version, hosted by Six Five Special, produced a big popular response. Another “National” contest held one day in Bury St Edmunds attracted entries from all over the country but left a more tangible result in that winner and runners up were recorded by Esquire Records. These sides, with The 2:19, The Station, The Delta and the Lea Valley Skiffle Groups, have all been re-issued on a Lake CD and probably give us our best opportunity to hear what the amateur groups of skiffle’s high noon sounded like. Given the excellent sleeve note by Paul Pelletier this CD is well worth investigation by the historically minded. There isn’t much doubt either about the fierceness of the competition these contests engendered. When the Vipers were touring with Stanley Dale’s National Skiffle Contest they found one performer in tears because an unknown rival had smashed up his guitar, fearing the competition. The performer had only started on guitar a few weeks before and knew only a handful of chords. Nevertheless the competitive vandal must have had enough of an ear to recognise a unique talent. The sabotaged performer never bought another guitar but switched to violin and became something of a household name in the folk and rock worlds during the seventies. His name was Dave Swarbrick and he moved, via the Ian Campbell Skiffle and Folksong, Group to world-wide fame as the fiddle player with Fairport Convention. One problem was that these amateur groups tended to take their songs, and often their arrangements, from the headline groups of the day. So not only was the repertoire repetitive in itself, but the name groups suffered too as they saw their hit recordings imitated by every group in the contest before they themselves had a chance to play. Given that there is a finite number of times that even the happiest audience can listen to Worried Man in one evening, then the contests probably contributed to skiffle’s rapid demise in its first popular form. However, at the same time they encouraged the spread of amateur music-making, and through them a number of names had their first experience of group music making in front of a live audience. It is not totally untrue to say that the plethora of amateur groups and contests was bad for skiffle but good for music making in general. Whatever field one looks at today, jazz, pop, folk, comedy, even classical music, one finds musicians who cut their performing teeth in a local skiffle group contest. Among such performers was Hank Marvin in the Crescent City Skiffle Group, and later with Bruce Welch in the Railroaders. John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney were part of the Quarry Men Skiffle group while Ringo Starr was with the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group. Much of the work the two groups did was performing in local skiffle contests and we have their own testimony as to the efficacy of these promotions in encouraging practice and proficiency. The great jazz bass players, Danny Thompson and Dave Green both of whom started with school skiffle groups, tell much the same story. The competitions gave exposure and an incentive to practice, and they were a huge stimulus to a previously moribund amateur music making movement. Non Londoners may be critical of the Metropolitan bias of this potted history of skiffle but, like New Orleans, Chicago and Kansas City at certain times in jazz history, it was in London that a number of factors reached critical mass and developed something new. In London in the early fifties the sheer concentration of people made the likelihood of a fresh trend more likely. There was the first and, at the time, the only jazz and blues specialist shop which was bringing in imports somehow - at a price. There were enough isolated experiments in folk clubs, jazz clubs, coffee houses, to make a new musical mixture possible. More performers with different ideas were coming together and they had access to one important source - the record library at the American Embassy where both Donegan and Wally Whyton picked up a lot of material. Nevertheless the club scene was slow in starting. One reason was that the skifflers from the jazz scene regarded their music as light relief, as interval music, or as an extra to the serious business of the evening which was jazz. Another was that the coffee bar scene was free, at first, so there was not the incentive to develop a club, which in those days was, likely as not, a room above a pub. There was also a certain amount of money to be made busking wherever people gathered or passed in large numbers, and this provided an income with less overheads than a club which required advertising in the Melody Maker and so on. Probably the first club off the ground was John Hasted’s Good Earth Club. Almost forgotten today, it featured a young singer/guitarist doing Woody Guthrie songs. He was Alexis Korner, later of course to make a name in quite a different field. At that time though, many felt that all folk music, all non Tin Pan Alley music, shared a common basis as music of the oppressed. The cultural nationalism of later years was yet to take hold and the mixing of blues and European folksong by one singer was quite acceptable. The club faded out but later emerged again as the 44 Skiffle and Folksong Club with Redd Sullivan and Marion Amiss, both members later of The Thameside Four, and both happy to mix traditions in the name of a general folk music of the people. The club was important enough to bring down Americans like Jack Elliott, Peggy Seeger and the mysterious but influential Nicky Thatcher - the first twelve string guitar player most of us had ever seen. The pioneer street band was The City Ramblers. The early history of this group can be found in the Southern Skiffle Society’s magazine Skiffle Party No.3. They were the first to use South Kensington Underground Station - a fairly lucrative venue - and also worked under the Arches at Charing Cross. Hylda Sims, Russell Quaye John Lapthorne and myself could be found in Covent Garden all night cafes, in the Perseverance pub playing for drinks, at any place with a few people where they could play a few numbers and perhaps pass the hat round. For some reason the traditional pitches of the theatre queues were avoided. Perhaps it was this peripatetic existence combined with some spectacularly bad weather that led the Ramblers to start a club at Princess Louise. It was already a venue for sporadic folk events (jazz altoist Bruce Turner backing Ewan MacColl was one ) and the Ramblers were able to pull in a heterogeneous audience for their version of roots music, a curious mixture of jugband jazz, blues, folk and cockney songs. Both Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whisky ran clubs there after the Ramblers left and it gradually became a notable folk venue as a home to Ewan MacColl’s Ballads and Blues. Quaye and the Ramblers moved on to open the Skiffle Cellar in Greek Street. This was 1957. By this time the audience for skiffle had peaked but the Cellar’s seven a nights week policy disguised this for quite a while. Besides, those who thought of skiffle as a part of folk music found it an agreeable haven from the increasingly rock and show business oriented Two I’s. Folkies too found a haven there as the folk movement was for a while taken over by a sort of fundamentalist puritanism which some how managed to create the impression that any overt enjoyment was “commercial”. So, freewheeling as ever, Quaye and Hylda held a sort of open house where the experimental, ‘give it a go feeling’ of skiffle’s heroic days was maintained. Most of the headline groups played down there. Wally Whyton would play with the Ramblers, as would Steve Benbow. Jimmie McGregor, by then with the Ramblers, would start his duetting career with Robin Hall there. If the Vipers weren’t working I’d take pickup groups there. One of them included the amazing Karl Denver, whose startling recording of the South African Wimoweh was to hit the charts later. Jack Elliott and the legendary banjo picker, Darryl Adams (a great influence on Donovan), would fall down there frequently (and literally, many nights). With the exception of the last two, most of us were operating primarily on tea, cocoa cola or what passes in Britain for coffee. The cellar wasn’t officially licensed but the odd bottle would be smuggled in and the management usually kept something in reserve for visiting celebrities. One of these was Sonny Terry who did a sort of ritual tour of Soho pubs - drinking Guinness mainly - before settling down in the Skiffle Cellar. He was entranced with the Ramblers, by this time with fiddler Eric Bunyan and guitarist Jimmie McGregor, and insisted on sitting in with them until located by official minders. Never desperately equable he showed his dislike at being taken away from an enjoyable session by sleeping through the official reception he was supposed to grace. The Cellar lasted about three years but its reputation and style outlived it. Whatever the intention of the new owners, its successor, Les Cousins continued its policy of all nighters and later to be famous names from the folk circuits of the world poured in. Wizz Jones, Pete Stanley, Ralph McTell, Jo-Ann Kelly, Bert Jansch, Rod Stewart. For a musician visiting London Les Cousins and its permanent all-night sessions were the place to head for. Its reputation, though, was established in its days as the Skiffle Cellar. The latter was never much of a financial success but socially and musically its influence was incalculable, as performers fleeing the increasingly show business Two I’s on the one hand and the forbiddingly austere new puritanism in folk music on the other, came together to learn and swap the ideas that became the massive folk boom of the sixties. There are few of the older folk names today who didn’t start as skifflers or as skiffle fans. Dave Swarbrick, The Watersons, the Spinners, Mike Harding, Ralph McTell, Davey Graham, Martin Carthy, Dave Burland,Tom Kilfellon, it’s impossible to list them all. And the clubs which started as skiffle clubs tended to survive as folk clubs. The King and Queen in Tottenham Court Road was one. It was there a young unknown (in Britain) American was spotted by Martin Carthy and asked to do a floor spot. His name was Bob Dylan, and he did. One other club must be mentioned, although many should be. That was the Roundhouse in Soho. Started by Cyril Davies as the London Skiffle Centre, it soon brought in Alexis Korner. Informal visits from Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, gradually confirmed the move toward a blues oriented programme. Davies started out as a Leadbelly imitator with a good command of the twelve string. I clearly remember taking Sonny Terry there one night and him saying “That Cyril sounds more like Lead than Lead does.” He moved over to harmonica as the sound electrified, Muddy Waters and Otis Spann paid state visits, and the stage was set for the new blues craze. Evicted by a pub landlord who said the music was too loud, they went to Ealing and the rest is the history of R ‘n’ B in Britain. Nevertheless, the first recordings for Dobell’s 77 label, were listed as the Alexis Korner Skiffle Group and Korner himself started out as a Woody Guthrie fan. At the height of the skiffle boom, Benny Green, writing a sleeve note for the Vipers Coffee Bar Session, estimated that six out of every ten people in Britain were in a skiffle group and the rest were watching them. No doubt the late Mr Green was being his splendidly sardonic self but there is a sense it which he estimated correctly. For a year or two skiffle was omnipresent and, as the ability gap between amateurs and professionals began to narrow, there was a sense in which the professional group became obsolete. With the exception of Lonnie Donegan whose dynamism saw him through, people did not want to pay to hear songs that they heard every day from their local groups. The novelty had lost its edge and there was a fresh generation who wanted something new again. Skiffle had been overexposed and as a result faded rapidly. Or at least it appeared to. In reality it simply went underground and appeared in fresh guises, in folk clubs, in the sixties country blues boom, in the vogue for R ‘n’ B that is still with us. Skiffle survived too in the jug bands (Dave Peabody’s Tight Like That was an excellent early example of post skiffle skiffle) and some of the goodtime groups, like the Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra, or Reet Petite & Gone. Go to any folk or general music festival today and you’ll find skiffle, even if it’s not billed as such. The fashion for skiffle among the general public died but the music went on in many varied forms and today most of the big names proudly announce their skiffle roots. One of skiffle’s big achievements was that it put an end to the phenomenon of someone studying piano formally for ten years and not be able to play a twelve bar blues at the end of it. After skiffle there were alternative ways of learning an instrument, alternative models and styles to adopt. Just as important, skiffle had shown that successful records were possible without the mediation of the Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths. As Simon Frith pointed out, the important thing about the Beatles was that they wrote their own songs. Lennon and McCartney had begun their lives in skiffle groups and their musical careers were thus detached from the formal framework of the popular music of pre skiffle days. The day of the performer song writer had arrived and the music business would never be the same. For most of this new generation Donegan was the important influence. Mark Knopfler, George Harrison and Joe Brown have all cited him in Chas McDevitt’s book on skiffle. Donegan, over and over again, is cited as the first influence by everyone from Chas Hodges to Chris Farlowe and Brian May. After that it’s a matter of guesswork. Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick were Vipers’ fans and rock historian Pete Frame has said “Donegan got the hits and McDevitt got the world hit but as a provincial musician myself I have to say it was the Vipers we all looked to. They were different.” Wally Whyton once said on the radio that “really skiffle was one man” the rest of us were spear carrying extras. In terms of public impact that is probably true, but skiffle was more than just one star. It was a revolution in popular music that produced rock, blues, folk, and comedy performers and all points in between. Skiffle gave us Mick Jagger but it also gave us Ralph McTell, Mike Harding and Roy Hudd. It changed not just popular music but the way people approached music, it gave us a different sense of what was possible and from its narrow base it massively enlarged the choices of listening to us all. We owe this not just to the Big Four but to all the known and unknown groups who took a jazz based novelty music and turned it, for a while, into an urban folk music, something that everybody who wanted to play could and did play. Outside of London, the decline wasn’t so rapid, and skiffle groups of one kind or another are still a feature of life in provincial towns if no longer part of the commercial music industry. The ultimate lesson is that if people can mix freely and exchange ideas new things will happen. Overdo the “security”, create large barriers between listeners and musicians, or musicians of different styles and the music will ultimately atrophy and become a caricature of itself. The freewheeling musical pot-pourri that Soho, via Ken Colyer and Chris Barber, created and called skiffle undoubtedly had its risible aspects. After all, there isn’t a great deal of cotton to be picked in South London and the 11:20 from Waterloo is hardly the last train to San Fernando. The point is that for some it drew attention to the original singers of these songs. For the rest it gave popular music a vitality on which the whole of music is still drawing. Music stopped being the special study of a few young specialists and became an activity open to everyone. Skiffle made the whole of Britian a musical nation. In the current talk about a skiffle revival there is a touch of unreality because skiffle never really vanished, and the results of the previous revolution are still very much with us. I sat in a London pub recently and heard Geordie folksinger Bob Davenport singing Bill Bailey. He was accompanied by jazz pianist Johnny Parker, one of those who started it all. The pair went on to do Blaydon Races and Cushy Butterfield. Those two are senior figures in their respective fields. Yet is is impossible to imagine them performing together without the eclectic influence of the skiffle movement they helped create. Skiffle then had a number of virtues. But above all it enabled people to realise that music was for playing and singing, not just listening. People who play music tend to take a more active interest in the music other people play and record. Some at least of the immense variety of music available today has a market because skiffle created an informed musical population who developed their own ideas of the sort of things they wanted to hear. In addition to being a wellspring for other lines of musical development skiffle became a tradition itself. Since its heyday there have always been bands and groups making music for its own sake, sometimes on improvised instruments, sometimes on orthodox ones, but always using the group playing of a song form as its basis. The new skiffle groups like The Lonnigans and the K.C. Moaners are not just reminders of a 40 year old craze. They are examples of a tradition that prevents popular music becoming the preserve of professionals. They are working within a much richer tradition than the original British skifflers would have thought possible, but it was skiffle that gave the tradition life. It is skiffle today that keeps that tradition vital and gets new amateur musicians started. This benefits the whole of music and keeps it vital.
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