>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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>> Betsy Peterson: It's so wonderful to see so many people here on Friday night for a fabulous lecture. That's so great [laughing]. Anyway, welcome. I'm Betsy Peterson. I am the Director of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress. And I want to welcome you to a very special edition of our Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series. Now, for those of you we don't know what that's all about, the American Folklife Center was founded in 1976 by Congress with a mandate to preserve and present American folklife. And we were placed here at the Library very specifically. Congress chose the Library of Congress as the site because the Library already had an incredibly vast archive of traditional music and culture. And so it seemed like the best place to be. And it's an archive that has been built for decades by the likes of John and Alan Lomax and Benjamin Botkin. And, actually, the archives plays a role and influences the topic that Billy Bragg is going to be talking about tonight. And we'll be finding out more about that. The Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series, which is named after one of those distinguished folklorists, provides a platform for professional -- I'm sorry -- professional academic individuals, people from the public sector, from the university, as well as colleagues working independently in folklore at their musicology, cultural heritage, and related fields to share their findings in their ongoing research. Now, that's great for the public. I think that's great for you. And it's certainly great for us here at the Center because these lectures form an important part of our accusations as well. And each one is recorded and becomes a part of the permanent archive -- I mean -- yes, part of the permanent archive here at the Library so that future generations can enjoy, listen, and study. So, that reminds me of my last caveat for you all, which is that this is a good time to say, if you have a cell phone or a mobile device, please turn it off or you will be memorialized in our archive [laughter]. So this evening we have a very special honor to present a  Botkin lecture who falls -- of -- a Botkin lecturer -- excuse me -- who falls outside of the usual categories of academic or public sector research. And so to introduce Billy Bragg and his work, please welcome our own Steve Winick. Thanks. 
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>> Stephen Winick: Thank you. As Betsy mentioned, I'm Steve Winick. I'm the Editor here at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. And I should say that this event is also cosponsored by the Folklore Society of Greater Washington so we want to thank FSGD for cosponsoring this with is. And I should also say that I'm pretty thrilled to have such a distinguished speaker. When I was a teenager, I confess, that I was a big Billy Bragg fan. And he's one of the first artists whose work I got as it came out as opposed to years after it came out because I was just old enough in the 1980s to have money and to have friends who were cool. And that's a big theme in Billy's book as well, the importance of teenagers in the music scene. So, like many people, my musical tastes kind of changed over the years and I ended up involved in traditional folk music and working here in a folklore archive, The American Folklife Center archive here at the Library of Congress. And last year it came to my attention that Billy Bragg had recorded an album called Shine A Light, which includes several songs that are first known from recordings in our archive. So I set about trying to get Billy here for our program. And I got as far as discussing in seriously when the album's promoter or the publicist, but he just didn't have time on his last trip to D.C. to come here. Now, what I didn't know at that time was that Shine A Light came about because of his research for a book about skiffle. And I knew something about skiffle from years as a music journalist and also because, working here, many of our recordings were important to the skiffle craze. So here's where the story gets cool and a little bit weird. Back at the end of 2016, Billy was getting the book ready for release and he realizes that maybe this is a better opportunity to come to the Library of Congress. Right? So that's what happens then. And he vaguely must have remembered that some dude at the Library of Congress had been trying to get him here before, but he's not working with that album publicist anymore, so how to find the dude at the Library of Congress? And that's when I get a message from my high school girlfriend, Jenny Lewis of Toronto, who says, "Send me your contact info at work. Billy Bragg wants to meet with you."
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So I'm not making this up. Billy's good friend, Avi Lewis, is the brother of my high school sweetheart and that's how he found me. And this would just be a funny story, except that I think it demonstrates Billy's tenacity as a researcher and his canny use of social networks and social media, all of which contributed to this book that he'll tell you about. So, without further ado, I will say that Billy Bragg is a singer, songwriter, activist, and author. He's known for beautiful love songs, for powerful political songs, and for standing up for what's right. In the folk world, he's also well-known for being one of the people who Nora Guthrie and the Guthrie family specifically asked to write music for many of Woody Guthrie's unsung lyrics resulting in the Mermaid Avenue sessions. And all of these activities have deep connections to our archive and the Library of Congress.	So, from now on, he will also be known as the author of an important book on skiffle called "Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World." So, without another word from me, please welcome our very special speaker, Billy Bragg.
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>> Billy Bragg: Thank you very much.
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Thank you very much. 
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Thank you very much, everybody. I'd like to thank the American Folklife Center for inviting me here and Steve's girlfriend for making it happen. 
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Yes. I was kind of telling everybody about the book -- the book was coming because I thought it was a book that may be interesting to people in North America, particularly here in the United States where the bands of the British Invasion are still so important to you. We were actually touring at the time when -- just last year with the Shine A Light record -- we were touring around the time Eight Days A Week was released, the Beatles movie, and it was making such a big splash. I was thinking to myself, "I hope I can find some way to connect these guys with the story I'm trying to tell," because it's a crucial part of that British Invasion story. And, of course, it's inspired by music that's -- some of which was recorded on behalf of the Library of Congress in the 1930s and in the 1940s. So let's start with -- let's start with the word, "skiffle." Skiffle is one of those words which you have to be very careful. It has a different meaning in the United States of America than it has in the UK. So a word like, "Pants."
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Or "fag."
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Or, "Socialism," actually for that matter now I think about it. 
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Which is why [inaudible], "football," at the top of that list of words that you have to be very careful how you use it when you come to this country because you get a lot of quizzical look. The word, "skiffle," originates in African American slang in the 1920s. The story that comes to us in the UK says it originates on the south side of Chicago, but I'm sure it's much wider than that. A skiffle was a name that African Americans gave to what we might call a rent party where they would organize some -- some food, cook some down home food often from the place where they originated in the South. They would brew up some hooch, get a boogie woogie piano player to come around and charge money at the door to raise some money. The word doesn't really have a strong musical connotation in the United States of America. It was used by Paramount Records in the '20s who made an album called, "Down Home," -- sorry -- a single called, "Down Home Skiffle," which was kind of like a -- a record that featured all their artists. It was like a sampler for the label. They had half a dozen artists on each side playing a couple of tunes and the concept of the thing was they were at a down home skiffle. And it ends with a knock at the door [knocking] and the narrator says it's the police and they've come to break up the down home skiffle. So that's -- that's the kind of early-ish use, but it's not a word that's picked up by African American musicians or anybody else for that matter until 1947 when a guy named Dan Burley records an album of songs that he played as a young man in Chicago on the South Side in the 1920s. Dan Burley is a kind of Renaissance figure in African American culture in the 1940s. He's a cofounder of Ebony Magazine. He hangs out with a lot of jazz greats, Ellington, and also writes a very popular dictionary of African American hip slang. And during -- in the context of the Trad Jazz Revival, someone says to him, "Why don't you make an album of those great barrelhouse piano tunes that you made in the 1920s that you sang [inaudible]?" So he gets together with Sticks and Brownie McGhee and they record an album called "South Side Shake" of predominately barrelhouse piano tunes. And the album is credited to Dan Burley and his Skiffle Boys. Now, in this context, he's talking about, we might say Dan Burley and his party boys. In my country, we would call it Dan Burley and his it" knees-up" boys. That's what we'd call it. It's a slang word for "party" in England, "A good old knees-up." So, yeah. In this context, "skiffle," is still referring to an event. Now, the Trad Jazz Revival kind of kicks off in the late 1930s where jazz fans, predominantly, begin to seek out the earliest recordings by -- particularly by New Orleans jazz bands because they believed that modern jazz -- not modern jazz, but contemporary jazz -- I think what we would not refer to as swing, has become too commercial, too big-time, too white break, and the jazz has lost its essence. And they begin to try to seek the earliest records and eventually they kind of come to an idea that New Orleans jazz is the only true, pure jazz. And what's special about New Orleans jazz is it has no soloists. The players play constantly all the time in and out of the rhythm and around one another. So Louis Armstrong, I know he's from New Orleans, once he goes to Chicago and starts playing solos, he's out, baby. He's out. They draw a line -- they draw a line in the sand just north of Lake Pontchartrain [laughing]. And anyone who crosses this line has gone over to the dark side. And in that, what they were trying to do, those fans -- and then, in my country, which it was very popular after the war -- there wasn't a trad jazz band in Britain until 1943 when a guy named George Webb, who worked in a machine gun factory, got together with a bunch of workmates to play -- or tried to play trad jazz. They didn't have a bass. They had a tuba. They couldn't find a bass, so they had a tuba.
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But they were basically trying to get a handle on this music that really moved them. They didn't know where it was from. They couldn't -- they couldn't put their finger on why it moved them so they were trying to play it. So a trad jazz movement grew up and the impulse -- the trad jazz impulse is not something unfamiliar in popular music. In many ways, the trad jazz aficionados, in trying to go back to basics to renew music, were following the same impulse of the Ramones in your country and Dr. Feelgood in my country in the mid-1970s when appalled by the commerciality of guitar rock. They sought to go back to the earliest sort of rock-'n'-roll, the absolute most basic rock-'n'-roll, that kind of idea that when music becomes stale, the way forward is sometimes to be found in the very back of the corner of the record store, in the back of the racks -- if you can find a record store -- in the back of the racks. It's quite a potent idea. And, unfortunately for the guys who want to play trad jazz in my countries in the late '40s and the early '50s, there's a musicians union ban on American bands touring in Great Britain. It's a reciprocal ban in response to the American Federation of Musicians stipulating in 1935 that British band leaders could only tour in the United States of America if they used American musicians and took out American citizenship. It's the worst kind of protectionism and as many of you all know I'm a staunch supporter of organized labor. It's totally embarrassing and that it should happen in music as well is -- it's -- but I cover it extensively in the book -- because it's absolutely unbelievable. This band -- the Ministry of Labor in British, the Musicians Union, asked the Ministry of Labor to institute a reciprocal ban. So between 1935 and 1955 no American band toured the UK and no British artist band toured the United States of America. That's a long time. Imagine if it had been 1965 to 1985. 
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I mean, just think about that. No Beatles. No Jimi Hendrix. No Judas. I mean, it's an incredible long time. And these were the days when the only way to find out how to play a musical star was to watch, to see, to sit on the edge of the stage and watch someone play, and listen to their technique. That was the way people learned how to play, but, sadly, for the British trad guys, the only way they had to learn was to listen to these very early recordings, these precious earlier recordings that they believed were the only real true jazz. Now, due to the primitive nature of recording in the 1920s, the musicians on those records really had to blow hard to get onto the record. They blew like Billy O. So the British jazz guys figured that was all part and parcel have it so they blew the hell out of their instruments. They really went for it. Because, I mean, jazz, you it, trad jazz has that pep thing. Maybe it was one of the things that first attracted people to it, that zip and pep. But, as a result of not having much technique, the British jazz guys, after 30 minutes, their lips were so numb, they couldn't play anymore. 
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So they were in a bit of a quandary. So what they did was they put down their brass instruments and they picked up acoustic guitar, washboard, and used the double bass from the jazz band and they performed what broadly you would refer to as Lead Belly's repertoire. And I say Lead Belly because -- I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say this this building, but he is the greatest folk singer that America ever produced, not only as a performer, as an interpreter, as a writer, as a popularizer. You know, Lead Belly was to Woody what Woody was to Bob. You know, Woody used to kind of sit around Lead Belly's house on 14th Street, sit in the corner and watch him play and listen to him talk. The man was physically a giant, but also culturally, in your country and my country, he was a giant. So the reason they played Lead Belly's repertoire was because there was an element of education and what they were trying to do. In my country in the 1950s, you could learn about jazz by going to something called a record recital because his music wasn't really played on the BBC. It was the only radio station at the time. You would go to somewhere like Wigmore Hall in London, which holds 1,200 people, and they would sell out something called a record recital, which is basically a jazz critic playing his jazz collection on a wind up foghorn record player and talking about the context in which these records are playing, who is playing, what, you know -- what the connections between this and other artists are. This was kind of really the only way to find out about jazz. And so, in that context, playing these Lead Belly songs, the trad jazzers believed that they were educating their audience in where jazz came from. They believed that jazz had evolved from the blues partly because -- they were mistaken in this -- the blues -- the twelve-form blues -- twelve-bar blues, we know, postdates New Orleans jazz. But I think they were misled by the fact that the trad jazzers used the term, "blues," on their records when they actually meant a kind of loose playing, like a jam. A blues would be a song that, you know, everyone was adding their own bit to. So there was an easy mistake to make. So, anyway, they began performing these Lead Belly songs and the guy who was the key proponent of this was a fellow called Ken Collyer and Ken Collyer was absolutely obsessed with New Orleans jazz. He was a trumpet player and one of the giants of the revival was a guy named Bunk Johnson. Bunk Johnson was a guy who claimed to have played with Buddy Bolden back in New Orleans. Buddy Bolden, allegedly the guy who invented New Orleans jazz. Again, I know there's probably half a dozen of you who are going to argue about that later, but I'm just passing on what's taken for fact in my country. Bunk Johnson disappeared in the 1920s. He was rediscovered in the '40s and made a couple of recordings with a band that included George Lewis on clarinet. George Lewis being one of the few New Orleans clarinet players who hadn't traded up to be a saxophone player when swing came along. And although Bunk was dead, George Lewis and the rest of the Johnson band was still playing in New Orleans. So they were playing in little whole-in-the-wall dives to people of a similar age to them, which is in the late 60s, early 70s. They weren't playing to young African Americans. They tended to be much more interested in the modern version of jazz, which, interestingly, modern jazz, bebop, had come from that same impulse to get away from the commerciality of swing. It's unfortunate that the trads and the moderns ended up at war with one another, but it was a similar impulse. The beboppers were just trying to make the future happen rather than going back to the past. But George Lewis was still playing in New Orleans. And Ken Colyer knew this and he finally realized that the only way he would really learn to play New Orleans jazz was to get to New Orleans. Now, in 1950s Britain -- early 1950s Britain, this is a mountain to climb. It's a real mountain to climb. The British government has currency restrictions which only allow you to take 10 pound per person out of the country because they're afraid of a run on the pound. And the fair across the Atlantic to get into the United States of America is not so straightforward for him. So he comes up with a brilliant plan. He joins the Merchant Marine. 
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Now, the Merchant Marine in my country works on a taxing rank principle. You go down, they give you a chit with the name of a ship, you go to the ship, you give it to them, you have to join the ship, they have to take you. So his first trip he goes to Australia. 
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His second trip he goes to the Gulf of Arabia. And the third trip he goes around the Cape of Good Hope. So after 18 months at sea, he's sitting back in the office waiting for another chit when the guy next to him looks at his chit he's just been given and says, "Dammit, Mobile, Alabama."
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To which Ken Colyer says, "I'll swap you." So they trade and Colyer gets to go to Mobile, Alabama on a ship running up and down to the Orinoco Cove where oil is discovered off of the coast of Venezuela. And after a couple of trips as the ship's cook, he gets to New Orleans, he jumps ship, he leaves the ship, and he gets a month long visa and rides the rails into New Orleans where he happens to -- there's a guy named Doc Souchong [assumed spelling] who's a jazz critic and also played in string bands in the 1910, 1911 who's a critic whose name he knows. In in those days British libraries had phone book -- well, the Westminster library -- just the Westminster library, had phone books for American cities. And so before he's left, he's gone and found Doc Souchong's phone number under MDs because he's a real doctor. That's how he found him. He tried finding George Lewis, but there were too many George Lewis's in the phone book. So he found Doc Souchong and Doc Souchong takes him to meet George Lewis and the band. He sees George Lewis and the band and, of course, he's bought his trumpet. And, of course, he knows their entire set. He knows their repertoire inside out. These guys are so made up, this young guy that's come here all the way from England. They're so pleased that someone's interested, someone young is interested in their music. So they say to him, "Why don't you sit up and play with us?" So Colyer, not only has he gone to the mountain top, not only has he climbed Olympus, but now he's sitting in with the Gods. I mean, this is just incredible. So he writes home to his brother who's a huge -- works in a Dobell's jazz shop in London, he's an expert on traditional jazz, he's writing home to his brother, Bill. Brother Bill's passing the letters onto the Melody Maker who are printing them. So people are reading -- this is unbelievable. Colyer's like in New Orleans. It's like he's gone to the moon. You know? It's like impossible. Everyone's like amazed by this. 
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But not everyone's amazed. Some people are very angry. Some people don't think a white boy should sit down and play with black musicians. This is around the time that your government was getting very suspicious of any subversive activity. And what Ken Colyer was doing was subversive. And the proof of that is that when he went to renew his month visa, he was arrested. Now, he was a day late on his visa. His visa was due for renewal on December the 25th. So you can imagine they might say, "Well, fair enough, son. You couldn't get here on Christmas Day. We'll renew it." And even if they didn't say that, the usual way to deal with someone who's violated their -- the -- thing to get them in the country, is to put them in a hostile until they can be deported. Ken Colyer is put in jail with no bail. He's kept there for 38 days. It's absolutely clear. And whenever they ask him why he's come to New Orleans, he says, "I've come to New Orleans to play with those guys." And they keep him in jail all that time. It's clear that, you know, they saw him as someone who was challenging the Jim Crow law in New Orleans. And everybody in the jazz community, Doc Souchong and those people that he's been staying with are trying to get him out of jail. They're appalled. They're absolutely appalled. Ken -- Ken's really pleased because now he's the only person in Britain who will be able to sing Penitentiary Blues with any credibility. 
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Because he's still writing to his brother and this is still appearing on the pages of the Melody Maker. He's like -- not only has he played with Bunk Johnson's band, he's now in jail in Louisiana like Lead Belly himself. I mean, how great is this! So after 38 days, they resolve the -- he was -- he has the problem of how he gets home resolved for him when he's deported on the SS United States of America, which, at the time, has the blue ribbon for landing crossings. So, having come over as the second cook on an oil boat, he kind of goes back in some style and he's met at the boat train by his brother and a ready-made band. He comes back to London like the Trad Jazz Moses, down from the mountain to tell it as it is. You know? And his brother has pulled together a band led by Chris Barber on trombone, has Monty Sunshine on clarinet, Ron Bowden on drums, and includes Lonnie Donegan on banjo. And they become the Ken Colyer Jazz Men. And they instigate this breakdown session as an integral part of what they do. But one day they're doing a radio program for the BBC and the rather observant BBC producer notices that -- they decide to do some skiffle songs. So they put down their brass instruments. They reconfigure. Lonnie Donegan comes to the mic. They have to set up the vocal mic. Lonnie Donegan comes to the mic to sing. Colyer's playing guitar. Barber plays the bass. Bill Colyer plays a bit of washboard. And the producer says, "Well, hang on a minute. Hang on a minute. This is not the Ken Colyer Jaz Men and they're definitely not playing jazz." So he says to the band's manager, "Well, what is this? What is this music and who are -- you know -- who is this band?" So Bill Colyer, his brother -- Ken's brother -- says, "This is the Ken Colyer Skiffle Group." And in that moment he takes the meaning of the word, "Skiffle," and changes it completely to mean a sub-genre of American roots music indigenous to the United Kingdom.
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It can happen. 
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It goes from being an event, a -- a house party -- to actually being a type of music played -- played in the UK. Why did he choose the term, "Skiffle?" Obviously, he knows Dan Burley and his skiffle boys record. It was very popular in the UK. The real reason I suspect is because if Bill Colyer tried to tell the BBC that he and his brother were playing the blues, they would have been laughed out the broadcasting house. All of the credibility that Ken got by going to New Orleans would have gone down the tubes because everybody knew in 1953 Great Britain that the blues could only be played by old African American guys. Everyone knew that. So, instead, in order to get to this music and to have the -- the validity to be able to play this music, they had to find a kind of -- another way. And it's really important that they found a term that did have some roots in African American culture. It's really, really important to them. I mean, there's a few other words he could have chose. He could have chose "jug band." There were some elements of jug band in skiffle. He could have chosen "spasm band" because the spasm bands made their own instruments. But he chose skiffle -- he chose skiffle and I like to think he chose skiffle because it has the kind of automatic sound of a washboard being scraped and cheap Czechoslovakian guitars being played not in tune. So that was -- that was how skiffle got its name in the UK. Now, Ken Colyer was a -- you might have seen some photo -- did -- you ran the photographs earlier. You might have seen it was the guy wearing the jacket, it had the word "Smile" on it and had the biggest frown you've ever seen. Ken -- Ken -- he's in the book. Ken was one of those guys who frowned upon any modernity music. When the band used to go outside the London clubs and play to audiences that wanted something familiar to dance to, Ken frowned on that and nobody could frown like Ken Colyer. He could have frowned for England if we had had a frowning team. So --
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One of the things he really didn't like was Lonnie Donegan. Lonnie Donegan was a sort of -- he was already a star in his own mind and him coming from the back of the band stand where he played in the rhythm section with the -- the drums and the bass to the front of the stage, he just owned the place. He owned the place! And, unfortunately, Ken Colyer had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about this. So he went to Chris Barber and he said, "I'm going to sack Donegan. I can't stand him." And -- and, years later [laughing], Chris Barber told me, "You see, that's no grounds for sacking Lonnie Donegan. Nobody could stand him."
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So -- but Barber, being the noble soul that he is, he said to Colyer, "I'm sorry, Ken, this is a collective. This band is a collective and we have to make collective decisions." So they had a band meeting, took a vote, and they sacked Ken Colyer. 
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[ Laughter ]
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And Ken Colyer [laughing] -- Ken Colyer went off and formed his jazz band with a new bunch of guys and Chris Barber formed his own jazz band, got a new trumpet player. And in 1954 they made rival records for Decca. Both featured skiffle songs -- a couple of skiffle songs. Colyer's band lacked that cutting everything. Colyer himself saying he was not a great -- he wasn't a great singer. He was a great trumpet player. He wasn't a great singer. Alexis Korner was in his skiffle band. He played the mandolin in Ken Colyer's skiffle band. Alexis Korner who went on to found the British R&B boom by running a club from which the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds and many of those bands emerged, the [inaudible] club in the early '60s. But Barber -- Barber was trying to push the envelope as much as he could with his own little jazz band. And, on the 13th of July, 1954, he was booked to record an album of New Orleans jazz called New Orleans Joys for the Decca label. And it soon became clear that they didn't have enough new material to live up to Chris Barber's vision. And the producer, Hugh Mendel was aghast at this because he'd made Decca put up 30 pounds to -- which is not a lot with the exchange rate the way it is at the moment I'll tell ya -- the session was going to crash when Donegan said, "Well, why don't we record a couple of skiffle songs?" because they needed eight tracks and they only had six. So the producer says, "I don't care what you do. I just need -- [inaudible] with enough tracks." So Barber picked up the double bass. Donegan got on the guitar and the telephoned Beryl Bryden who was Britain's premiere washboard player. And she came down with a musical washboard. And in short time they recorded "Rock Island Line", Lead Belly's "Rock Island Line", and John Henry. And the album was released in 1955 and got some very, very nice reviews in the context of New Orleans jazz. And that was kind of it for a while. The jazz band carried on playing and they carried on doing their skiffle breakdowns and -- and towards the end of 1955 someone at Decca Records decides to release "Rock Island Line" as a single. It's not absolutely clear why that is, but "Rock Island Line" is released as a single in December -- November 1955. And it appears in the charts -- the first chart of 1956. Lonnie Donegan, "Rock Island Line" appears in the charts. And I think in order to -- you've probably heard all these songs in the warmup music, but I think in the context of what we're doing now, I think we should have a listen to "Rock Island Line". Gus, if you could play track five, please, that would be great. 
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[ Music ]
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There he was gone. Lonnie Donegan, "Rock Island Line" recorded in July 13th, 1954. Some context. Just one month before Lonnie Donegan recorded that song, the rationing of food ended in Britain. It'd begun in 1940 during the war and continued after the war. Rationing of clothing, rationing of petrol, rationing of food. What that meant was that if a child was born in 1940, let's call him John Lennon, he would have to wait until he was 14 years old before he could go into a sweet shop and buy what he wanted. Sweets were on the ration. Cakes were on the ration. Childhood was on the ration. And what happens in 1954, '55 is that first generation of war babies leaves school and they find work pretty easily. There's a lot of semi-skilled labor work there particularly with young women going to work in factories. And they're earning good money, sometimes more than their parents. And they only have one expense, which is giving some housekeeping to their mums. So what happens in '54, '55 is sales of cosmetics, of records, of clothing start to rocket. And for the first time a group of consumers and a cultural group become visible in the UK and that group are teenagers. Now, there were teenagers, of course, between the war, but they tended to be -- the ones that were visible to us -- tended to be middle class and upper class teenagers, the flappers, who were known to the -- to papers. There was no teen culture between the wars. What happens in '54, '55 is this cohort of working class -- and it is exclusively working class kids because the middle class and upper class kids went to university and tended to go into professions that deferred earning until adulthood such as medicine and the law. So these kids, they have never been visible before. The music that's been made available for them has been novelty songs for children, How Much Is That Doggie in the Window. And the BBC just doesn't really sort of cater for that kind of demographic. They don't -- they don't really see them. And the context of what was happening -- Gus, if you could just play track 21, if you wouldn't mind. This is a song that was number one when "Rock Island Line" was recorded.
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[ Music ]
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Don't worry. We won't have to hear all of it. Just to give you a flavor. 
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[ Music ]
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That'll do, Gus. Thank you. 
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[ Laughter ]
^M00:39:23
Culture -- culture as such was mediated by the BBC. The BBC was the only broadcaster and the only TV station. There was no commercial broadcasting, no commercial TV station until 1955. You could hear rock-'n'-roll if you listened to Luxemburg, Radio Luxemburg, which was coming out of Europe, or the American Forces Network, which was audible if you lived near an American base. But really the BBC had a dead hand on culture. So, in 1955, when on the back of the popularity of the movie Blackboard Jungle, Rock Around the Clock gets into the charts. The BBC doesn't really play it. There's a program called Family Favorites, which is a request program and there's a chance, if you listen to that, enough people might have requested Rock Around the Clock that they might play it and you might hear it. So what happens is when "Rock Island Line" comes out, a new -- a new idea comes forward, you know, because obviously having heard Rock Around the Clock and also in 1955 there's a number of what we refer to in my country, what they referred to at the time, is hillbilly songs, get into the charts. This will be Slim Whitman. It will be Tennessee Ernie Ford. And these are kind of coming in on the back of the arrival of commercial telly and their propensity to buy cowboy series from the United States of America and broadcast them. And so this -- kind of these figures are emerging in our culture playing guitars because the guitar is not really an integral part of British culture in the first half of the 20th century. There are some guitars played in the musical, but really if you heard or saw a guitar on the telly or on the radio, it was often in the context of an outsider character. It would be a singing cowboy, a bluesman, or a calypsonian, calypso was the identifying culture of the first wave of migration to our country beginning in 1948 from the Caribbean. And although calypso comes from Trinidad, it kind of became the identifying culture of the West Indian migration when the West Indies defeated England in a cricket match for the first time in 1950 and a couple of calypso songs got into the charts. So really it was an outsider's instrument, the guitar. And Donegan is -- doesn't look like a British singer. You know, all of our singers -- one of our singers had a hit just before Donegan put out with the theme title from the movie, The Man from Laramie. It was a cover of a Jimmy Stewart song. But even on the leave of that record, the singer was wearing a dinner jacket and a bowtie. That's the image. And there's Donegan, doesn't even have a normal tie on and he's kind of singing that song, he's lashing at that song like it's -- you know, he's on a runaway train. It's kind of getting away from him. And the most amazing thing in it, it transpires that he was born in Glasgow and he's lived in London most of his life. So when he goes on tour in 1956 -- in late 1956 -- he's bringing a message that's probably the most revolutionary that British youth were ever -- ever learned and that is, a, you don't have to be a trained musician to make music, and b, you don't have to be an American to sing American songs. And this is -- this is a startling experience for a lot of young people. Van Morrison is 12 years old when he hears Donegan singing "Rock Island Line". He's familiar with Lead Belly -- Lead Belly's version -- because his father collects blues and jazz records from an importer, Atlantic Records, in Belfast. But his own aspirations to play music focused on Irish folk music. He can imagine himself playing that. It could never have imagined himself singing "Rock Island Line" because it's -- it's a blues song. He hears Donegan and he's -- you know, he's awake. He suddenly recognizes that he can sing these songs as well. If Donegan can sing them, so can he. So he forms a band. He forms his own little skiffle band. And it's, you know, startling to think that someone as young as 12 could be moved by that. But George Harrison was 13 when he first saw Donegan in Liverpool at the Empire in November, 1956. He went every night to see Donegan. Donegan was there for a week. It's a variety circuit. It's the only circuit there was and it's like vaudeville circuit and they played two shows five nights a week. George Harrison went every night. He was 13. Paul McCartney was 14. He went one night and he came home and he told his dad he didn't want to play trumpet anymore, he wanted to play guitar. And it's not recorded whether John Lennon went, but it's significant that within two weeks of Donegan playing in Liverpool, Lennon had formed his own skiffle band, The Quarrymen.  And it's the age of these kids that is really so significant because it's something that never happened again in our culture, such a level. You know, skiffle was not like a normal scene of music, you know, professional musicians deciding to play some music. It's much more akin to the fidget spinners craze, which is currently --
^M00:45:04
[ Laughter ]
^M00:45:06
I'm afraid it is. It's a complete -- skiffle was a playground craze.  It was a playground craze. Every sentient schoolboy in the UK learned to play the three chords necessary to play all of Donegan's repertoire. You know, it was -- they were basically finding old guitars that were knocking around. They were importing them from -- from Czechoslovakia. Sales of acoustic guitars in Britain in three years went from 5,000 a year to 250,000 a year. It's like the Cabbage Patch dolls. You know this? It is! There are stories in the book of, you know, guys saying, "You know, I had a man in here the other day waving around a 10 pound note asking for a guitar and I couldn't find one. I couldn't get one for him." You know, it's not just a small group of people playing music that spreads. This is like -- this is like absolute wildfire. Why would it spread so quickly? What could possibly be driving something like that? My sense of is it's to do with the BBC and Rock Around the Clock. When the BBC refused to play Rock Around the Clock, those kids said, "You're going to ration rock-'n'-roll? You're going to ration bloody rock-'n'-roll? You know what you can do with that, mate?" And they went out and made their own music. They went out and made their own sound. They got together. They borrowed their mom's washboards. They made a thing called a tea chest bass. Now, a tea chest bass -- a tea chest is a kind of meter high box, meter by a meter, by a meter square box that we used to import tea leaves into the UK with. There was -- everyone had one in their house because they were used for storage boxes. So everybody had one. To open them, they literally saw -- there's metal rims around all the edges to make it sturdy. And they just saw the top -- saw a hole in the top and take the top out in one piece. But if you then turn the box upside down and add a broom pole to the side and draw a piece of twine to the center of what was the base that's now the top of the tea chest, you can kind of get a duhn-duhn-duhn kind of sound. If you look -- the guy lying on his back on the right there, you can just see the twine of the -- of the tea chest bass. And that flat line under his hand, that's the broom pole. And the reason he's lying on his back is because that's what Bill Haley's bass player did. He'd lay on his back and lay on top of his instrument and so they -- they went out and learned to -- the three chords necessary to play Donegan's repertoire. And Donegan continued to have hits and other artists had hits. But really -- really what it -- it was this kind of underground things. It was these kind of kids. You know? And what's significant I think and different from the experience here in the United States of America is I can't think of a musical genre that has had the majority of its performers under the age of 18. I don't think that happened here. Yes, there were people playing folk music here. Of course there were. There were people playing the blues here. But it wasn't -- it wasn't absolute, you know, sub-teen grassroots and so huge as it was in my country. Donegan has a hit in the United States of America in the summer of 1956, "Rock Island Line". It gets to number eight in the Billboard Charts. It appears on the Ed Sullivan show and does a skit with Ronald Reagan. 
^M00:48:43
[ Laughter ]
^M00:48:45
And he tours around the country. He ends up on a kind of rock-'n'-roll tour -- a package tour -- headlined by Chuck Berry. But he has a bit of a problem -- a ban on musicians traveling that ends in 1955 finally comes to an end, which allows him to travel. But he's -- he's like me, Lonnie Donegan. He's not really musical. He doesn't write notation. You know? He's kind of that -- so he's got no notation and so he's doing like six shows a day starting at 11 O'clock in the morning in cinemas playing with a pit orchestra that doesn't really know what he's talking about. When they get to Detroit, one of the other bands on the -- on the bill, the Rock-'n'-Roll Trio, that's Johnny Burnette and Dorsey Burnette and Burlison, probably the greatest rockabilly band outside of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. They're also playing. And Johnny Burnette says, "Listen, man, why don't you let us accompany with you those songs? We -- you know, we can play that stuff. Why don't you let us play rather than these old guys?" And Donegan being Donegan says, "Oh, I don't know if I can afford that." Johnny Burnette says, "It's not about money, man. It's about music." So for a few weeks on the rest of that tour in Detroit and around the Midwest, skiffle meets rockabilly as an equal and recognizes that they are coming from the same kind of place. Unfortunately, there's no recordings of this. It's a real shame. But I think if you're looking for something in the United States of America that would be similar in its shape and duration, it would be rockabilly. Rockabilly is superseded by rock-'n'-roll, Elvis at RCI and all that kind of stuff in the same way that skiffle is superseded by British Elvis impersonation -- impersonators by the middle of 1958. But here's a really interesting fact. Donegan records "Rock Island Line" 30th of July, 1954, speeds up an old blues song and saves a recording section that's gone absolutely nowhere. Just a week before in Memphis, Tennessee, Sam Phillips at Sun Records is trying to coax an Ernest Tubb song out of a rather recalcitrant truck driver and it's not really going anywhere. So he says, "Look. Just take a break." And this kid who's a bit sort of nervous, he picks up an acoustic guitar and he starts playing a goofy version of a song called "That's All Right Momma." And the bass player, he thinks it's very funny so he joins in with a goofy bass line and the guitar player joins in too and Sam Phillips in the control room sticks his head around the door and says, "What are you doing?" And the guy said, "I don't know what we're doing." So he says, "Well, back it up. See if you can find a place to start and let's record it." And that is how Elvis Presley makes his first recording. And so the fact that Donegan and Elvis should be so close in time that it should be almost simultaneous -- almost simultaneous -- says something about what was happening in your country and what was happening in my country. The -- the connection there between guitar led music -- because I do think that for the skifflers back in the -- in the 1950s, if they saw a sign tonight, "skiffle," they wouldn't necessarily think it would just be Lonnie Donegan songs. It would be guitar led music, music played on guitars. It could be blues. It could be country. It could be calypso. It could be English folk songs. It could be anything. It represents the coming of the guitar for that generation. And what the guitar represents to them is a break with the past, a break with the past. The guitar was so unfamiliar to that generation, Bill Drummond, the genius behind the KLF, read the book, told me he first saw a skiffle band when he was six years old. He thought the guitar player had a hole in his stomach. Now, you could not get to six today without seeing someone playing a guitar. It would be impossible in our culture, but in British culture in those days, the guitar represented a break with the -- the generational curve. It was their way -- those kids' way of saying, "Old timers, forget it. This is something new. We're -- we're moving away from what was before. This is our year zero." And it's because of the -- the youth of these people is what is significant. It's not what they did in '56 and '57 and '58. It's what they do in '61, '62, '63, '64. You know? Because what happens is when your young men, their contemporaries, are learning to play guitar when they're 16, 17, 18, our teenagers are already in Hamburg. They're already playing rock-'n'-roll. And the knock on effect to that is when the Beatles break into the American charts in January 1964 and have their first number one, there's a whole phalanx of British bands who have been playing seven, eight years ready to come in behind them. Skiffle is the nursery for the British Invasion of the American charts. And between January 1964 and December 1965 there's a British band at number one in the American charts for 52 weeks out of 104. And every single one of them began as a skiffle band, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Tremolos, the Animals, Chad and Jeremy. The only exception is Petula Clark. Petula Clark is an exception because, a, she -- when "Rock Island Line" came out, she had already released a dozen singles under her own name and, b, she's a girl. For some reason -- although there were a number of female performers on the records -- Nancy Whiskey singing "Freight Train" you probably heard earlier. And the City Ramblers, they were Shirley Bland and Hilda Simms. There are very few photographs of young women in the records -- of young women in skiffle bands because that's -- that's all that's left really because these young bands, they were so young they didn't make any records. They are kind of like the soft parts of a fossil, you can't see them. You know? It's what they do later you see. So what's left is literally thousands of photos like this one, which is a stock photo from a newspaper archive. Newspaper photographers loved skiffle bands. And I've seen a lot a lot of them and the only one I saw that was an all-women's band was actually some Irish travelers with their mom who had dressed up and played skiffle just for the occasion. So -- but the thing is young women were absolutely crucial to the whole thing because I think it was young women's determination to create their own social space that really made it possible for the skiffle kids to get out of the church hall, and the scout [inaudible], and the school gymnasium and go to somewhere where there was actually sort of teen interaction because the young women who suddenly inherited this incredible spending power, they needed their own social space. They didn't want to go in the tea rooms, the Lyons corner house where they stewed all the food where their mothers used to take them. They couldn't socially go into a pub on their own. So they colonized the brand new cappuccino bars that had started opening up across the UK in the mid-50s. And this is very, very significant because the cappuccino bar offered a level of sophistication that wasn't there in the rest of the culture. And by that, I mean they looked towards Paris, towards Milan, towards Rome, towards Madrid. You know, this was Jean Seberg rather than Marilyn Monroe. This was a distinctive determination to find their own culture. So these women -- and, you know, they had these beautiful high-tech gadget machines, these new gadget machines, and to top it all off, the coffee bars tended to be covered in this wonderful new material, Formica.
^M00:56:55
[ Laughter ]
^M00:56:57
And the sexual frisson of all that lead inexorably to the arrival of young men playing guitars and skiffle. Of course! Where else would you go? Go where the young women are. I mean you have a choice. You're a British kid, you have a choice. You can either go out and play football with your mates or get a guitar and go down to the coffee bar where there's girls. It's -- you know? My sense is that it was young women that were deriving it. Young women wanted to jive often when one another. The footage from the day -- the documentary newsroom footage from the day often shows young women jiving with one another. They practiced in their rooms. My aunties told me that they spent all their time practicing jiving with one another only to find that men were useless at it. Teddy Boys were useless at it so they'd jive with one another. And there's great footage of grumpy Teds all standing round while young women jived to trad jazz. I mean it's -- I think -- I wish there'd been more time for me in the book to follow that idea because I think there's a whole story there of the -- how young women drove teenage culture during that period. But the -- I think the crux of the matter with regard to that generation of teenagers is that they used American roots music for a very specific purpose. When the folk revival became visible in the United States of America in 1959 when the Kingston Trio, originally a calypso band into Kingston, Jamaica -- not Kingston upon Thames, a suburb of Surrey -- when the Kingston Trio had a hit with Tom Dooley, the folk revival became visible culturally here in the United States of America. And bands like the New Lost City Ramblers, who were contemporaries of Donegan and Colyer, they went back to Appalachia to discover the likes of Doc Watson and Roscoe Holcomb. They were -- they were escaping from contemporary American culture back to something that they felt was more true and pure. The skiffle kids were doing the absolute opposite. They were using -- paradoxically using American roots music to make the future happen, to escape a past in which they were wearing hand-me-downs, where their culture was mediated by bureaucrats, in which their freedom was circumscribed by parents who -- whose experience in the war had led them to lower their expectations somewhat. And Donegan, he breaks the fourth wall of British pop culture and he says to these kids, "Take this guitar and build the future with it." And they built a bridge to the future so strong that it crossed the Atlantic and went to the top of the American charts. And I would argue that we are still living with the ramifications of what happened in the skiffle boom. Thank you very much. 
^M01:00:02
[ Applause ]
^M01:00:24
Now we -- we have time for some Q and A. I'm happy to take questions about anything so please --
>> Thanks very much. 
>> Billy Bragg: My pleasure. 
>> I also appreciate the music that you do and I was wondering, you did some beautiful work on Mermaid Avenue with all those Woody Guthrie lyrics and I'm thinking of Walt Whitman and --
>> Billy Bragg: Ingrid Bergman. 
>> Yes. 
>> Billy Bragg: Yep.
>> And Ingrid Bergman. How did you piece together those lyrics? How did you get those lyrics? And how did you get those beautiful melodies? 
>> Billy Bragg: Well, you got to understand the material that we were working with was so rich and so sturdy that you -- you know, you could throw anything at them. "Way Over Yonder" in the Minor Key you may be familiar with from the album. I've played that like a rockabilly song. It still works. The lyrics are so -- are so good, you can do -- you can do anything with them. In fact, we did. One of the great things about Mermaid Avenue, working with Wilco is every day it was like going to the dressing up box. "Who are we going to be today?" You know? "Let's be Tom Waste today and play all the songs like Tom Waste. Let's be The Band. Let's be, you know, "Times They Are A Changin'" Bob Dylan." One day Wilco decided to be Cheap Trick.
^M01:01:45
[ Laughter ]
^M01:01:47
We didn't get much done that day, but --
^M01:01:49
[ Laughter ]
^M01:01:50
You know? So really -- I mean, it was -- I don't know. There was one -- there was one song called "Go Down to the Water," which I knew Nora loved. It was about her mother and her elder sister, Kathy, who sadly died as a child in a fire. And Woody's writing to them and their standing on the beach at Coney Island where Woody and Marjorie's ashes are scattered. And he's talking about them going down to the water and watching the convoy that he's part of depart to D-Day. It's a very, very powerful song and I knew it was very important to Nora. And I couldn't get a handle on it. I couldn't get something on it that did it justice. And I'd written 20 lyrics by -- 20 of the songs, but I was stuck with this "Go Down to the Water." I was watching the TV at home and there was an advert for Irish Bah. And the soundtrack was Shane MacGowan from The Pogues singing "She Moves Through the Fair." And I jumped up from the telly, ran into the office, pulled out our Lyric, and sang it to the tune of "She Moves Through the Fair." And I came back and sat down on the sofa next to my missus and I says, "21."
^M01:03:03
[ Laughter ]
^M01:03:05
So I don't know where it come from, mate. I really don't know. But all I can tell you is the material we were working with is so great we were basically -- I'm sure Jeff and the guys feel the same -- we were merely providing the frame for those -- for those works of art so that it could be hung up on the wall and everyone could admire them. There seems to be a gentleman at the front.
>> Hi. Thanks. Are there any scenes out there these days that interest you or excite you that make you think it could be where the next wave of potentially important music could come from? 
>> Billy Bragg: Yeah. Are you familiar with grime music at all? It's a kind of -- it's urban music from the UK. It's a mixture of hip-hop and Jamaica dance hall. And during the recent general election, the grime artists, as a genre, came out in support of Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the labor party. I haven't seen that happen since we've been doing red wedge back in the day. And even then we kept him at arm's length. But the grime guys, they didn't. They really went for it. And I think, one, I'm really pleased about that. Two, I think they're using music in the way it was used predominately in the 20th century as a way of communicating with people who won't listen to them because they talk to their own community that way, but it's also their only opportunity to get in your timeline and my timeline. Mainstream pop doesn't do that anymore. Mainstream pop has other ways of getting in your face. Young people now -- I'm sorry. Young people have other ways of getting in your face that don't need to do what I did when I was 19, which is if I wanted my voice heard, I had to learn to play guitar, do gigs, and write songs. But the grime guys are still doing that. And it kind of -- it's the answer to the question about where is all the political music these days? It's right in front of your face. If your problem is you're looking -- not you personally. Don't take this personal. I'm generalizing. I'm sorry. 
^M01:04:49
[ Laughter ]
^M01:05:00
I just realized -- I'm sorry. If your problem is that you want political music and you're looking for white boys with guitars, Ed Sheeran is over there, mate. OK? Sorry. It's just -- I'll get asked -- not this particular question, but people often say to me, "Where's all the political music?" I'm like, "just Google, 'grime 4 -- the number 4 -- Corbyn.'" Those guys are right on it. They are right on it! Just like punk. Just like skiffle. You know? Making their own culture for their community and doing something authentic. It really -- it really cheered me up. I'm sure there's an equivalent in the United States of America, I just don't know about it. Want a secondary, mate? 
>> Yeah. As this gentleman just asked, why isn't there more of a connection, though, between political music around the world in your view? 
>> Billy Bragg: Now -- you mean as compared to the 20th century? Music's lost its vanguard role in culture. It's as simple as that really. You know, there's so many different ways. If you're pissed off about the world, not there are so many different ways you can articulate that. You know, you can sort of stir up a Twitter storm, start a Facebook page, write a blog. You can make a bloody movie on one of these things and edit it. I mean, you know, why go to all the trouble to learn an instrument and have to stand up in front of people, which is quite a high bar, you know? It allows -- the internet and the social media allow more people to participate in the -- in the 20th century, there was really only one social medium and that was music and it had to encapsulate everything, every experience, love, politics, football, whatever. You know? And we had, you know, in my country, four weekly music papers in which to fresh out the ups and downs of that and communicate with one another along those lines. That's not happening in music anymore apart from in places like grime. And I was going to say, I'm sure there's scenes in the US that are like that. But I'm encouraged that more people are able to, you know -- through social media, more people are able to contribute to the -- to the discussion. But no one is ever going to ask you to tour America reading out your tweets.
^M01:07:03
[ Laughter ]
^M01:07:05
So there's a catch. Sir?
>> So I'm just curious. You're a little younger than these skiffle musicians and stuff. Can you draw a line from this to you or how you were drawn to this subject? 
>> Billy Bragg: Yeah, of course. I was born in peak skiffle, 1957. Peak skiffle is actually the 6th of July, 1957. We just passed the 60th anniversary of peak skiffle. 
^M01:07:29
[ Laughter ]
^M01:07:31
That's the day in which John Lennon's band, The Quarrymen, are playing at Woolton Church Fete and Paul McCartney turns up to come along and join the band. Just an interesting aside -- I will come back to your question -- an interesting aside, at the height of Beatlemania here in the United States of America, a DJ from Philadelphia went to Hamburg to find out about the Beatles' experiences there and he met a German wrestler who had been given the job of looking after the Beatles and keeping them out of trouble. And he said to this wrestler, "What were they like when they first came to Hamburg?" And the guy says, "[in German accent] Ah! They played too much of that washboard music."
^M01:08:12
[ Laughter ]
^M01:08:13
He said [laughing] -- he said, "[in German accent] British bands, they think Lonnie Donegan is Elvis!" And the implications of that -- apart from the fact I don't do a very good German accent [laughter] -- the implication of that is that the Beatles were still a skiffle band when they got to Hamburg. You know? They were still basically the three guitar players from the Quarrymen. So, you know, it's -- it's not something that just ends in 1958. It ends in 1977 when the first generation of British musicians appears that were -- never played skiffle. Right up to there and there are still artists -- you know, Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople and those kind of guys -- they're still emerging all the way up to '77. But it's my generation, the punk rockers, who are really the first cohort to not have roots in skiffle. But, incidental -- interestingly, rather -- skiffle is -- has many similarities with punk rock, the most obvious one being the punk rock slogan, "here's three chords, now form a band." You know? That's exactly the same as with skiffle. You know, there were -- there were -- you know, some of the skiffle bands made Flexi Discs in the way that punk bands did. There were skiffle fanzines that people wrote themselves and sold at gigs. There are many similarities. And if you want talk about DIY music, well, these guys were making their instruments with stuff they bought in a hardware store. How DIY do you want it to get? You know, I mean? So -- but really I think the most powerful connection for me we skiffle is that punk was a music that kind of empowered you to make your own music. You know? That was the thing about skiffle. You don't wait for someone to say, "You can make music." You just go and do it and skiffle -- you know, that is the essence of skiffle. And I think being able to see that period through the prism of my own experience in skiffle allowed me to not only understand better how the scene might develop, but also to communicate it to a generation younger than myself who have no reference points in the early '50s. So there's quite a few references to punk rock in the book as a way of trying to marry them up because I think skiffle should have the same credibility as punk. It doesn't. It doesn't have very much credibility at all and the reason for that is that in 1967, pop turns into rock. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is released, Rolling Stone magazine appears, beards are grown [laughter], and stroked [laughter]. And if you're a -- if you're a British rock star -- let's say you're Jimmy Page and Rolling Stone asks, "Who first inspired you to play guitar?" You're not go to say Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey are you? You're going to say Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly. Yet, if you look on YouTube, there's a fabulous clip of a 14-year-old Jimmy Page on a BBC TV program playing a song called "Momma Don't Allow No Skiffle Playing Around Here." And when he's interviewed by the avuncular BBC presenter who asks him if he wants to be a skiffle guitarist when he grows up, he says, "No," he wants to find a cure for cancer. But, hey, you can't say he didn't have ambition, can you? 
^M01:11:32
[ Laughter ]
^M01:11:33
So that's the -- it's that -- I think what happens is when rock becomes serious, skiffle becomes the embarrassing photo in the school yearbook and gets -- and gets put in the attic. Some people remember. Some people never forget the debt they own Donegan, Van Morrison being one of them, that recorded with Donegan. And every now and then you get a hint of what happened. George Harrison was asked if the Beatles were influenced by the blues and he said, "Yeah, of course we were. No Lead Belly, no Lonnie Donegan. No Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles." And, yet, that quote often appears -- and he says, "Therefore, no Lead Belly, no Beatles," and that quote usually appears as, "No Lead Belly, no Beatles." Donegan is written out partly by journalists who were there at the time who were very sniffy about skiffle. And, interestingly, the only sniffy response I've got to the book was from a guy who was there at the time. And, you know -- and it's something that that time struggles still to overcome. You know? Because -- it's understandable. Rock-'n'-roll is so exciting and it is so all encompassing. But it was skiffle -- it was Donegan who put the hands -- put a guitar in the hands of the war babies, not Elvis Presley. 
>> I just wonder whether there was a reaction, you know, like there was to punk, a sort of outrage in newspapers. And you mentioned Teddy Boys briefly and I know there was sort of a newspaper outrage about Teddy Boys. So is that also linked with an older generation worried about these new kids and what they were getting up to with their guitars? 
>> Yeah. Teddy Boys sort of predates skiffle. Teddy Boys are kind of there in 1952. There's a chapter in the book that sort of follows that as the sort of first British youth cult. The trouble comes from Rock Around the Clock. There's a -- the movie, Blackboard Jungle, which is a pretty good movie, it's Glen Ford, he's a teacher in a school in I think it probably must have been in New York somewhere and he's got a load of hoodlums and he's trying to educate them. But the movie opens with Rock Around the Clock and that's the first time it had been heard in the UK. And if you've grown up your whole life listening to music through a speaker about that big and you go to a cinema and the speakers are as big as the book there -- cover -- and they're playing this music loud, you know, people were dancing in the aisles. People were jumping up and dancing in the aisles. And a year later a movie called Rock Around the Clock came out, which had something like 12 performances by Bill Haley and his comments in it. I mean, there were riots. My uncle Dave and my aunt Christine were at a riot in Rumford. I only found this out subsequently when I asked them. And my uncle Dave helped to turn the firehose on the manager at a cinema. 
^M01:14:37
[ Laughter ]
^M01:14:39
So there was some concern [laughing] about it, but also -- also it was -- they attempted to cooped skiffle as well. It's often -- the one book that was written by -- about skiffle in the '50s, written by a vicar.
^M01:14:55
[ Laughter ]
^M01:14:58
So, yeah, it was a bit of both. Yes? 
>> Hello, Bill.
>> Billy Bragg: Hi [inaudible]. Here I am. 
>> How are you? 
>> Billy Bragg: Good. 
>> Great. No pom poms today. 
>> Billy Bragg: OK. 
>> But anyway.
>> Billy Bragg: Ken, is it you under that hat? 
>> Yeah, it is. 
>> Billy Bragg: Oh, here you are. Sorry, I didn't see you under the brim. How are you, mate? 
>> Yeah. 
>> Billy Bragg: Tell me you bought a new T-shirt. 
>> Yeah. Anyway. Great to see you. 
>> Billy Bragg: Great to be here.
>> Been a few years. And, of course, I have to ask about this. As a Jewish guy who is sitting in Silver Springs, Maryland and who loves England folk and folk rock and has for almost 40 years, I'm wondering about the connection between skiffle and that particular scene. I seem to recall reading somewhere that Mr. Martin Carthy was in a skiffle band a long, long time ago and it does seem to me that you may be right that the skiffle thing, man, probably started the English rock-'n'-roll business over here, the folk rock, and maybe other stuff. 
>> Billy Bragg: It's true, Ken, because what happens is when rock-'n'-roll comes in, there's a kind of split between the guys who want to play beat music, you know, the Beatles and their cohort. There's another group who want to play the blues and they become the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. But there's also a group who are wanting to stay faithful to playing your acoustic guitar and they kind of form the very first folk clubs. Ewan MacColl plays a big role in that. And -- but there are also significantly a number of Americans involved in skiffle by pure coincidence. It just so happens that when "Rock Island Line" comes in the charts, Alan Lomax is living in London. He's in London ostensibly to record a world music series for CBS, but he's also there because he's afraid he's going to lose his passport and his job as part of the Red Scare. So he's there in London. Jack Elliott, Ramblin' Jack Elliott is also in London when "Rock Island Line" hits the charts. He's hitchhiking around the world with his new wife, June Hammerstein, and he's like -- talk to the skifflers -- he's like a walking god. I mean, Ron Gold said to me, "I couldn't believe it the first time I saw Jack Elliott. He was wearing Levis and a hat." So, yeah, he was a big figure. And Peggy Seeger is also in London at the time. She was traveling around the world and she started going and playing in the coffee shops as well. And she played a lot of -- because her -- very interestingly, her repertoire had both -- because of the nature of where she got her repertoire from, some of it was from the British Isles anyway. You know? It kind of was from over in the UK. So she fit right in with the idea of playing folk music, Ken. You know, she had the -- that beautiful banjo of hers to play. 
>> You know [inaudible] that and she even reminds me a little bit of [inaudible].
>> Billy Bragg: Yeah. 
>> So I'm wondering who --
>> Well, Shirley was in a skiffle band with Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl and Alan Lomax call the Ramblers. They had a little TV program and they were kind of using -- MacColl and Lomax were older, but they were kind of using music to -- the skiffle music, to get their agenda, the music they wanted, work songs and folk songs, onto the radio. 
>> Hi. Would you talk a little bit about the musicology in the book? It looks like there's a track that -- there were tracks that you were asking to be played. Is there music accompanying the book? 
>> Billy Bragg: Well, obviously there is, but it's not in the book I'm afraid. But you can always -- all this skiffle stuff is on Spotify now because it's out of -- it's all out of copyright. So if you can use the titles in the book -- I thought about putting in a discography, but I didn't want to narrow it down. So if you use the titles in the book, Donegan's easy to find and the rest of the stuff is easy to find as well. 
>> Have you thought about recording some skiffle yourself at this point? You've got this huge connection to the music, you're talking about how it's not really out there, it's this sort of step child and sort of ignored in history. Have you thought maybe, not only with the book that you're clearly very knowledgeable about and it looks amazing, but maybe putting out a record of your own with skiffle music? 
>> Billy Bragg: Well, interesting, last year me and a guy name Joe Henry got on a train in Chicago, Illinois, and rode it all the way to Los Angeles via San Antonio and when the train stopped in the largest cities to allow freight traffic to pass, we jumped off and recorded a classic railroad song in the railroad stations along the way. And there are, when you look at the track listing, I think there are five Lead Belly songs on the record including "Rock Island Line". But if you look at it from the United Kingdom, there's five Lonnie Donegan songs on it. 
^M01:19:51
[ Laughter ]
^M01:19:52
So it's kind of -- that kind of is our record. Can I say something about cultural appropriation because that's been a question that has come up a few times if you're interested? 
^M01:20:02
^M01:20:07
In 1956, Lonnie Donegan had a hit with the song called "Stewball," which is a quite famous folk song, concerns a jockey whose racehorse speaks to him and tells him how he's going to win the race. Lead Belly recorded it. Woody recorded it. Now, Lead Belly could have got it from two places. He could have got it from his own experience because it was a song very familiar to African American field workers. So familiar it was the Lomax's who recorded a version that Lead Belly may have heard, they said it was the most common song they found when they were recorded in the 1930s among African American sharecroppers. Now, 100 years before that, "Stewball" was being sung in boarding houses and bars in New York and Boston. A hundred years before that, it was being sold as a broadside ballad on the streets of George in London. And in 1752-3, the actual event on which the song was based happened at the Curragh of Kildare in Ireland. Now, given that progress, who does this song belong to? Who has the rights to say, "This is my song?" Lead Belly? Lomax? Woody? I mean, at least Donegan had an Irish money. He did have a [inaudible] I think in the holy [inaudible]. But I think that one of the problems with the debate about appropriation is it runs contrary really to the spirit of music. Music belongs to everyone or no one. You know? It kind of lives by being sung. Martin Carthy who Ken just mentioned had a great phrase. Once he said to me, "The only bad thing you can do to a song is not sing it." You can't put it in a corner and say, "This belongs here." MacColl tried this. MacColl and Peggy tried this in the folk clubs in London in the '60s and said you can only sing songs that come from your own culture. And it was like a, you know, like a form of Stalinism. You know, who needs -- folk music doesn't need police. You know? It needs -- it needs to go wherever it goes because the great thing about "Rock Island Line" is Lead Belly didn't write it either! You know, Lead Belly heard it from Lomax. He and John Lomax working together recorded it in Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas and in 1935. I'm proud to say I held the paper sleeve of the original recording with John Lomax's handwriting on today in the other building. It was a moment of deep meaning to me I have to say. But, you know, the guys who sang in the prison, Kelly Pace and the other seven prisoners who came to Lomax's microphone and sang "Rock Island Line" as a call and response song, they didn't write it. They didn't write it either. It was originally appeared Rock Island employees working in Little Rock in the engine sheds in Little Rock. The company encouraged the formation of glee clubs and, in this case, it was an African American quartet who wrote this song and would perform it at social functions to advertise the railroad. That's where it really starts. And who knows that they didn't borrow a song from somewhere else? And Donegan -- Donegan also -- everybody who sang that song added something to it. The great thing that Donegan does is he introduces the idea of a toll gate on the record. If you listen closely to Lead Belly's record, Lead Belly, the signalman is telling the train driver to go in the hole, which means in a siding, because in the golden age of American railroads, freight had to give way to express trains. But it was an exemption on animal welfare grants if you were carrying livestock. So the train driver says to the signalman, "I've got all livestock. I've got pigs. I got horses," and he says, "OK. You can carry on." And then he pulls away and he shouts back, "I fooled you. I got pigiron," which may be a pun, maybe a pun by Lead Belly. In Donegan's version, there's a toll gate and he's having to pay some kind of a tariff. Now, there never was a toll gate on the American railroad ever. Donegan -- Donegan kind of got -- I don't know what -- maybe he didn't understand what Lead Belly was saying, but he invented that. But, interestingly, he watermarked the song. He watermarked the song. Anyone you hear singing a version with a toll gate in it, it's Donegan's version they've learned rather than Lead Belly's version. And, interestingly, Johnny Cash's first album for Sun Records in 1957 starts with "Rock Island Line" and he mentions a goddam toll gate. 
^M01:24:55
[ Laughter ]
^M01:24:57
So we have a saying in the American Folklife Center which is, "What goes around, comes around," and that's [laughter] -- that's how you explain skiffle. It's how you explain the Beatles. It's how you explain "Stewball." It's how you explain the multicultural society that we belong to. The people are able to hear music from outside their own cultural context, be inspired by it, and grow up to love the people who made that music. And that's -- that's the great thing about folk music. Thank you very much.
^M01:25:30
[ Applause ]
^M01:25:44
>> Stephen Winick: So we want to thank everyone for coming and we want to say that there's a table out in the front where you can buy books and you can get Billy to sign books if you've already bought them. So we're going to be there for just about an hour. We have to be out of the building at 9:30. So that is our deadline. So head out the front and you'll see Billy there. Thanks very much once again on the behalf of the American Folklife Center and the Library of Congress.
^M01:26:10
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.