“Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World”, by Billy Bragg

464 pages, Faber & Faber, ISBN-13: 978-0571327744

Skiffle? Skiffle. Skif-fle. Just what in the hell is…“Skiffle”. Well, I’ll tell ya: it is, in essence, the English interpretation of American blues, folk and jazz music. The word itself is rather more mysterious, as the phrase “to make a skiffle” means, in the West of England, to make a hash of things, whereas in the American South it was a term for a rent party, a social event with a small charge designed to pay rent on a house. Alright, then. As should be obvious from this brief digression, modern music is a mansion with many rooms: Blues, Country, Easy Listening, Electronica, Folk, Funk, Hip-hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Reggae, Rhythm & Blues, Rockabilly, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Salsa, Soul…and that is just a small, small sampling of what I’m talking about. But, what about skiffle? Where does this peculiar word fit in to all of this? As all forms of music have their ardent champions, skiffle has found its most eloquent advocate in Billy Bragg, whose Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World seeks to educate the world at large about this oft-overlooked and misunderstood form of music.

This may seem like a vain boast, at first, given that skiffle is often derided as a moribund sub-set of an entire category (folk music) which, in turn, is all-too-frequently characterized as terminally “uncool”; Bragg himself concedes that skiffle exists “in the dead ground of British pop culture, between the end of the war and the rise of the Beatles”, having left “little tangible evidence” of its relatively brief period of popularity, so that in the popular consciousness it registers, if at all, as a footnote to the formation of the Beatles (the original Quarrymen were a skiffle group, after all) and in the recordings of Lonnie Donegan, who sold out in making novelty songs like “My Old Man’s a Dustman” just as clearly (but much less profitably) as Elvis did when he started making ever-worse movies. Furthermore, the British teenager of the day was shaped by more profound forces than skiffle music, like the baby boom, full employment (at long last) and the end of National Service. But when Bragg talks about skiffle changing the world, he’s really thinking more about its lasting musical legacy: in the book’s final chapter, “The British Are Coming”, he makes the convincing argument that “skiffle was boot camp for the British Invasion” by pointing to the origins in skiffle of – *deep breath* – Marc Bolan Jack Bruce Dave Clark Joe Cocker Roger Daltrey Wayne Fontana Ian Hunter Paul Jones John Lennon Gerry Marsden Paul McCartney Graham Nash Jimmy Page Alan Price Rod Stewart Ronnie Wood Bill Wyman...and a host of other seminal figures in the UK pop and rock scene of the 1960s and beyond.

It is clear that what appeals to Bragg is not just the music but its practitioners’ attitude and the way in which skiffle was produced: “the first music for teenagers by teenagers in our [English] cultural history”. Not surprisingly then, Bragg sees punk as the spiritual heir of skiffle: music produced at a time of austerity, which rejected the overproduced confections of the then mainstream and comprised a rough-and-ready three-chord DIY form of expression which was raucous, energetic, empowering and authentic (it also makes the unknowing case for how “cultural appropriation”, one of the modern Left’s current bugaboos, is utter bullshit; music is music, you like what you like, and it can be mixed, adapted, changed and merged to create – well, anything). So thank you Billy Bragg; it all makes sense now. I now have the context and the background to comprehend what it meant when John Lennon said “We started as a skiffle group”. All my life I have loved the Beatles and the music brought to our shores by The British Invasion. Skiffle and Lonnie Donegan were references to ghosts I had but vague impressions of, but now I have the context and the foundation for understanding what led up to the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Beatles. How did the guitar get to the front of the band? How did folk, blues, country, jazz, and traditional music become the rock and roll and popular music we know today? Why, skiffle, thank you very much…and thank you, Billy, for laying out the entire social, cultural and musical history that led to birth of modern music. Compelling and well-written, this is a musical history lesson worth digesting.