Feeling My Age

Donegan’s Gone covered by PJ Wright & Dave Pegg (of Fairport Convention fame) on their album Gallileo’s Apology. The song is Mark Knopfler’s tribute to the 1950s King Of Skiffle. For me this version is truer to the spirit of the song than MK’s original recording.

In the early fifties Lonnie was the banjo and guitar player in Chris Barber‘s Jazz Band and during a group recording session he knocked out a cover version of Leadbelly‘s “Rock Island Line” which became a huge international hit in 1956. But because he’d recorded it on a band recording session, the record company paid him nothing beyond his original session fee. But it was enough to launch his solo career and he became the UK’s first superstar of the rock’n’roll age.

In the late 50s when my big brother became a teenager, he bought several 78s by Donegan including “Cumberland Gap”, “Tom Dooley” and “Battle Of New Orleans” but to my generation he was better known for novelty hits like “My Old Man’s A Dustman” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour”. The conventional wisdon in Tin Pan Alley was that skiffle, like rock’n’roll, was a passing flash in the pan. So the industry pressured Donegan to become an all-round Family Entertainer to safeguard his longterm career.

The same thing happened to Tommy Steele – my brother bought even more of his music to play on the family gramaphone: “Singing The Blues”, “Butterfingers,” “Water Water”, “Handful Of Songs”… and then the novelty songs like “Little White Bull”, “What A Mouth (What A North & South)” and, eventually, “Flash Bang Wallop (What A picture)”.

Sure, we all sang along with those cheeky chappie numbers, and our mums and dads decided that Donegan and Steele weren’t so bad after all. The difference was that Tommy had probably been showbiz at heart from the word go, whereas Lonnie had been deeply immersed in U.S. jazz and blues culture. Recording comedy songs was the death of his musical credibility.

The biggest difference between that first generation of homegrown stars and The Beatles is that the Fab Four managed resist that pressure to become Light Entertainment. And of course that they wrote their own hits. Brian Epstein may have kept their image clean-cut and loveable for as long as he could, but for the most part Lennon and McCartney, unlike Lonnie Donegan, stayed true to their musical muse.