Welcome to episode twenty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rock Island Line" by Lonnie Donegan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Erratum

I say in the episode that rationing in the UK ended the day that Elvis recorded "That's All Right Mama". In actual fact, rationing ended on July 4, 1954, while Elvis recorded his track on July 5.

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

The resource I've used more than any in this entry is Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg.  I thought when I bought it that given that Bragg is a musician, it would probably not be a particularly good book, and I only picked it up to see if there was anything in it that I should address, given it came out last year and sold quite well, but I was absolutely blown away by how good it actually is, and I can't imagine anyone who listens to this podcast not enjoying it.

This five-CD box set of Lonnie Donegan recordings contains over a hundred tracks for ten pounds, and is quite astonishing value.

And this collection of Lead Belly recordings is about as good an overview as you're likely to get of his work.

Patreon

This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?

And why not back the Kickstarter for a book based on the first twenty episodes?

Transcript

In this series, so far we've only looked at musicians in the US -- other than a brief mention of the Crew-Cuts, who were from Canada. And this makes sense when it comes to rock and roll history, because up until the 1960s rock and roll was primarily a North American genre, and anyone outside the US was an imitator, and would have little or no influence on the people who were making the more important music.

But this is the point in which Britain really starts to enter our story. And to explain how Britain's rock and roll culture developed, I first have to tell you about the trad jazz boom.

In the fifties, jazz was taking some very strange turns. There's a cycle that all popular genres in any art-forms seem to go through – they start off as super-simplistic, discarding all the frippery of whatever previous genre was currently disappearing up itself, and prizing simplicity, self-expression, and the idea that anyone can create art. They then get a second generation who want to do more sophisticated, interesting, things. And then you get a couple of things happening at once -- you get a group of people who move even further on from the "sophisticated" work, and who create art that's even more intellectually complex and which only appeals to people who have a lot of time to study the work intensely (this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing) and another group whose reaction is to say "let's go back to the simple original style".

We'll see this playing out in rock music over the course of the seventies, in particular, but in the fifties it was happening in jazz. As artists like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus were busy pushing the form to its harmonic limits, going for ever-more-complex music, there was a countermovement to create simpler, more blues-based music.

In the US, this mostly took the form of rhythm and blues, but there was also a whole movement of youngish men who went looking for the obscure heroes of previous generations of jazz and blues music, and brought them out of obscurity. That movement didn't get much traction in the jazz scene in America -- though it did play into the burgeoning folk scene, which we'll talk about later. But it made a huge difference in the UK.

In the UK, there were a lot of musicians -- mostly rich, young, white men, though they came from all social classes and backgrounds, and mostly based in London -- who idolised the music made in New Orleans in the 1920s. The