If you’d been a teenager in the early 50’s you might have struggled to find the kind of music that appealed to you. Popular music was dominated by crooners, swing bands, calypso and jazz…largely the music of your parents!
Then two things happened. The first was across the Atlantic where a thing called Rock and Roll started to emerge, led by Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley. Popular as this was it still wasn’t at first particularly accessible to the youngsters in this country.
The second thing that happened, however, was closer to home. A singer from the Chris Barber Jazz Band called Lonnie Donegan released a record called ‘The Rock Island Line’. After a slow, spoken introduction Lonnie, playing an acoustic guitar, went into a frenzied rendition of this song which he’d got from the singing of an American ex-convict called Lead Belly, or Huddie Ledbetter. The kids loved it and it stayed in the charts, or ‘Hit Parade’, for 8 months in 1956.
Lonnie’s song had come from the ‘breakdown’ sessions he had been doing with his jazz band. In the interval, some members of the band would put down their brass instruments for a rest and play simple American folk, blues, gospel or country songs with guitars, banjos and other acoustic instruments. The ‘breakdown’, or ‘skiffle’, sessions soon became more popular than the jazz and a whole new movement in music was born.
The word skiffle was taken from the name for a house party in Chicago where people would make a donation to the rent costs to enjoy a night of music, often on home-made instruments like a washboard or a cigar box fiddle. In this country young people soon cottoned on to this aspect of skiffle and started to get involved themselves.
Inspired by Donegan, The Vipers, The Chaz McDevitt Skiffle Group and many other recording artists, youngsters started to get guitars, make a bass using a tea chest, a broom stick and some string, make a percussion instrument by scraping thimbles on a washboard or use any other acoustic instruments they could get hold of. Guitar sales soared, especially as you could pay a deposit of 6 shillings and 8 pence (33p), with 22 fortnightly payments of the same amount to get a fairly rudimentary guitar but one which looked the part. Some skiffle bands featured three or more guitars in the line-up!
For two years between 1956 and 1958 church halls, community halls, school gyms, scout huts and coffee bars resonated to the sound of ‘Worried Man Blues’, ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’, ‘Freight Train’ and many other popular skiffle numbers, all done on no more than three chords! There were national skiffle competitions, featuring some of the hundreds and hundreds of skiffle groups in the country.
In their shows Hop, Skiffle and Jump reproduce the sounds of the 50’s, featuring some of the most popular songs from that period. There are anecdotes and stories aplenty, with top quality musicianship and loads of energy!