Ode to Skiffle Billy Bragg restores a forgotten musical genre to its proper place in history
BILLY BRAGG IS OFTEN labeled a protest singer. He has, after all, frequently used his gift for poetic storytelling to campaign for left-wing causes. And in 1998, Nora Guthrie, daughter of American working-class champion Woody Guthrie, asked him to put her father’s unrecorded lyrics to music for a series of commemorative albums. The 60-year-old musician from Essex, England, however, prefers to use the moniker “topical songwriter.”
In his new book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World, Bragg takes his fight for underdogs’ justice to perhaps the most dismissed musical genre of the 20th century. It’s a 400-page paean to the makeshift bands British teenagers experimented with in the 1950s, seeking a raw new sound to define their generation. Playing acoustic guitar, washboard and tea-chest bass, they took inspiration from New Orleans jazz and American blues artists such as Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy. “I think skiffle deserves to have the same credibility as punk,” says Bragg. “It came and went so quickly.”
The movement’s reputation waned after its only mainstream star, Lonnie Donegan, became a variety performer, his hit 1960 novelty single, “My Old Man’s a Dustman,” forever eclipsing his popular 1954 rendering of “Rock Island Line.” But skiffle’s reputation also suffered because of its legacy as the music legendary rockers like the Rolling Stones and David Bowie performed before they were any good. “A lot of the guys in skiffle bands were 13, 14 and 15,” says Bragg. “I wouldn’t want anyone to hear the songs I recorded with my next-door neighbor when I was that age.”
In researching the book, Bragg spent time holed up in the British Library, poring over old articles about that musical period, “trying to kick apart some of the legends that have built up over the years but actually were quite true,” he says. The most riveting of the central characters—and skiffle’s founding father—is a cantankerous merchant seaman, Ken Collier, whose nose for great American music led him to “inadvertently inspire a generation. He’s the great unsung hero of the story of British rock,” says Bragg.
A train trip for the book resulted in Bragg’s 2016 album with L.a.-based songwriter and producer Joe Henry, Shine a Light: Field Recordings From the Great American Railroad. “I became aware of all these railroad songs that had been part of skiffle,” says Bragg. That would include skiffle’s most famous song, “Rock Island Line,” the origins of which the author fastidiously traces, following the old rail route from Rock Island on the Mississippi River in Illinois to Arkansas, where John Lomax and Lead Belly first recorded convicts singing it in 1934 at the Cummins State Farm correctional facility.
Strangely, most Americans have never heard of skiffle. “It’s a part of the story they are missing,” he says. “We’re talking about the nursery of the British invasion.” The Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, Small Faces, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and T. Rex all started with skiffle, which is why, says Bragg, “I think Donegan should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” The campaign begins here. —AMY FLEMING