I went out and bought "Rock Island Line", which I remember was on a 45rpm and my cousin had one of those gramophones that didn't have a handle, that could play them. It made me wonder how many of you were into skiffle and was it all part of the jazz scene? I've only come across one band that plays skiffle these days, Peter Frank Allstars , maybe you know different?
Was skiffle part of the jazz scene? Hell yes, or so I'm reliably informed. I'm a bit too young to have been involved in jazz at the time, but I heard skiffle as part of a mass media hit parade what not, and had several Lonnie Donegan records, including Rock Island Line. Because I had no idea what skiffle was, I never pursued its connections with jazz or with American folk music. When I eventually discovered the latter, I felt a bit like the man who, seeing Shakespeare for the first time said "I never realised it had so many quotes".
Of the tracks you've listed on the jukebox, Rock Island Line traces back to Leadbelly obviously , although I wonder how many people know he learned it while working as an assistant to John Lomax, from a group of convicts whom Lomax recorded in the Arkansas State Penitentiary in Oct ?
There's others which were clearly picked up from Woody Guthrie, Elizabeth Cotton, The Kingston Trio etc, but some of the source performers were so obscure that I wonder how people in this country could have known about them in the s.
Unfortunately, I don't know of an authoritative history of the skiffle craze, although the two Ken Colyer biogs, When Dreams are in the Dust and Goin' Home, have a fair amount in them. But the Workers Music Association, which was forging links with the American folk revival as far back as the s, could well have been one source. Also there were visiting Americans such as Rambling Jack Elliott, Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, whose repertoires must have been extensively sifted through.
