Episode 21: “Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan

A history of rock music and 500 songs

by Andrew.

Episode 21 Rock Island Line by Lonnie Donegan.

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, 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 form 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 the form to its harmonic limits, going for ever more complex music, there was a counter movement 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.

These people, people like Humphrey Lyttelton, Chris Barber, George Melley, Ken Collier, and Aka Bilk, thought not only that bebop and modern jazz were too intellectual, but many of them thought that even the Kansas City jazz of the 1930s, which had led to swing, the music of people like Count Basie or Jesse Stone, was too far from the true great music, which was the nineteen twenties hot Dixieland jazz of people like King Oliver, Sidney Bequet, and Louis Armstrong.

Any jazz since then was suspect, and they set out to recreate that nineteen twenties music as accurately as they could.

They were playing traditional jazz, or trad, as it was known.

These rather earnest young men were very much the same kind of people as those who would, ten years later, form bands like The Rolling Stones, The Yard Birds, and The Animals, and they saw themselves as scholars as much as those later musicians did.

They were looking at the history and trying to figure out how to recapture the work of other people.

They were working for cultural preservation, not to create new music themselves as such, such, although many of them became important musicians in their own right.

Skiffle started out as a way for Tfad musicians who played brass instruments to save their lips.

When the band that at various times was led by Ken Collier or Chris Barber used to play their sets, they'd take a break in the middle so their lips wouldn't wear out.

And originally, this break would be taken up with Collier's brother Bill playing his old 78 records and explaining the history of the music to the audience.

That was the kind of audience that this kind of music had, the kind that wanted a lecture about the history of the songs.

The kind of people who would, in fact, be listening to this podcast if podcasts had been around in the late 40s and early 50s.

But eventually, the band figured out that you could do something similar while still playing live music.

If the horn players either switched to string instruments for a bit, played percussion on things like washboards, or just sat out, they could take a break from their main set of playing Dixieland music and instead play old folk and blues songs.

They could explain the stories behind those songs in the same way that Bill Collier had explained the stories behind his old jazz records, but they could incorporate it into the performance much more naturally.

And so, in the middle of the Dixieland jazz, you'd get a breakout set, featuring a line-up that varied from week to week, but would usually be Chris Barber on double bass instead of his usual trombone, Ken Collier and Tony Donegan on guitar, Alexis Corner on mandolin, and Bill Collier on washboard percussion.

And when, for an early radio broadcast, Bill Collier was asked what kind of music this small group were playing, he called it skiffle.

And so Ken Collier's skiffle group was born.

In its original meaning, skiffle was one of many slang terms that had been used in the 1920s in the US for a rent party.

It was never in hugely wide use, but it was referenced in, for example, the song Chicago Skiffle by Jimmy O'Brien's famous original washboard band.

We haven't talked about rent parties before, but they were a common thing in the early part of the 20th century, especially in black communities and especially in Harlem in New York.

If the rent was due and you didn't have enough money to pay for it, you'd clear some space in your flat, get in some food and alcohol, find someone you knew who could play the piano, or even a small band, and let everyone know there was a party on.

They'd pay at the door, and hopefully you'd get enough money to cover the cost of your food, some money for the piano player, and the rent for the next month.

Many musicians could make a decent living playing a different rent party every day, and musicians like Fat Swaller and James P.

Johnson spent much of their early careers playing rent parties.

If a band, rather than a single piano player, played at a rent party, it would not be a big professional band, but it would be more likely to be a drug band or a coffee pot band, people using improvised household equipment for percussion, along with string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and similar cheap and portable instruments.

This kind of music would have gone unremembered, were it not for Dan Burley.

Dan Burley was a pioneering black journalist who worked as an editor for Ebony and Jet magazines, and also edited most of Elijah Muhammad's writings, as well as writing a best-selling dictionary of Jive Slang.

He was also, though, a musician.

He'd been a classmate of Lionel Hampton, in fact, and co-wrote several songs with him.

And in the late 1940s, he he put together a band, which also included Brownie and Styx Magee, although Styx was then performing under the name of Globetrotter Magee.

They called themselves Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys, and it was them that Bill Collier was remembering when he gave the style its name.

The trad jazz scene in Britain, like the overlapping traditional folk scene, had a great number of left-wing activists, and so at least some of the bands were organised on left-wing cooperative lines.

That was certainly the case for Ken Collier's band, but then Collier wanted to sack the bass player and the drummer, because he didn't think they could play well, and the guitarist, now calling himself Lonnie Donegan, after his favourite blues singer, because he hated him as a person.

As Chris Barber later said, anyone who's ever dealt with Lonnie hates his guts, but that's no reason to fire him.

The band weren't too keen on this firing half of what was meant to be a workers' cooperative idea, took a vote, and kicked Collier and his brother out instead.

Collier then made several statements about how he'd been going to leave them anyway, because they kept doing things like wanting to play ragtime or Duke Ellington songs, or other things that weren't completely pure New Orleans jazz.

The result was two rival bands, one headed by Collier and one headed by Chris Barber, which became known unsurprisingly as the Chris Barber Band.

Barber is one of the most important figures in British jazz, although he entered the world of music almost accidentally.

He was in the audience watching a band play when the trombonist leaned over in the middle of the show and asked him if he wanted to buy a trombone.

Barber asked how much it was, and the trombonist said £5.10.

As Barber happened to have exactly £5.10

in his pocket at the time, and he couldn't see any good reason not to own a trombone, he ended up with it, and then he had to learn how to play it.

But he'd learned well enough that by this point he was the obvious choice to lead the band.

Both bands were still wanted by the record label, and so at short order the Chris Barber band had to go into the studio to record an album that would compete with the second album by Collier, but they didn't have enough material to make an album, or at least not enough material that wasn't being done by every other trad band in London.

So then the idea struck them to record some of the skiffle music they'd been playing in between sets as a bit of album filler.

They weren't the first band to do this.

In fact, Collier's own band had done the same some months previously.

Collier's new band featured clarinetist Akabilk, who would later become the very first British person ever to have a number one record in the US.

and it also featured Alexis Corner in its skiffle group.

That skiffle group recorded several songs on the first album by Collier's new line-up, including this Lead Belly song.

Umbrella on her shoulder, piece of paper in her hand.

She going to ask the governor, turn a loose mum and let the midnight special

shine a light on me.

Let the midnight special

shine a table of

That's Ken Collier, Bill Collier, Alexis Corner and Mickey Ashman.

And that gives an idea of the polite form of skiffle that Collier played.

But what the members of the barber band came up with, more or less accidentally, was something that was a lot closer to the rock and roll that was just starting to be a force in the US than it was to anything else that was being recorded in the UK.

In fact, there's a very strong argument to be made that rock music, the music from the 60s onwards, made by guitar bands, as opposed to rock and roll, a music created in the 1950s, originally mostly by black people, and often featuring piano and saxophone, had its origins in these tracks as much as it did in anything created in the USA.

The important thing about this

something that is very easy to miss with hindsight, but is absolutely crucial is that these skiffle groups were the first bands in Britain where the guitar was front and centre.

Normally the guitar would be an instrument at the back, in the rhythms section.

Britain didn't have the same tradition of country and blues singers as the US did, and it was still more or less unknown to have a singer accompanying themselves on a guitar, as opposed to the piano.

That changed with Skiffle,

and in particular, a record that changed the world almost as much as Rock Around the Clock had was this band's version of Rock Island Line, featuring Lonnie Donegan on vocals.

Rock Island Line is a song that's usually credited to Hoodie Leadbetter, who is better known as Lead Belly.

But as with many things, things, the story is a little more complicated than that.

Ledbetter was one of the pioneers of what we now think of as folk music.

He had spent multiple terms in prison for carrying a pistol, for murder, for attempted murder, and for assault, and the legend has it that at least twice he managed to get himself pardoned by singing for the state governor.

The legend here is slightly inaccurate, but not as inaccurate as it may sound.

Ledbetter was primarily a blues musician, but he was taken under the wing of John and Alan Lomax, two left-wing collectors of folk songs, who brought him to an audience primarily made up of white urban leftists, a very different audience from that of most black performers of the time.

As well as being a performer, Ledbetter would assist the Lomaxes in their work recording folk songs by going into prisons and talking to the prisoners there, explaining what it was the Lomaxes were doing.

A black man who had spent much of his life in prison was far more likely to be able to explain things in a way that prisoners understood than two white academics were going to be able to.

Ledbetter was, undoubtedly, a songwriter of real talent, and he came up with songs like The Bourgeois Blues.

Home of the brave, land of the free.

I don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie, Lord in a bourgeois town.

But Rock Island Line itself isn't an original song.

It dates back to 1930, only a few years before Lead Belly's recording, and it was written by Clarence Wilson, an engine wiper for the Rock Island Railway Company.

Wilson was also part of the Rock Island Coloured Quartet, one of several vocal groups who were supported by the railway as a PR move to boost its brand.

In that iteration of the song, it was essentially an advertising jingle, but within four years it had been taken up by singers in prisons and had transmuted into the kind of train song that talks about the train to heaven and redemption from sin.

If you want to ride, you've got to ride it like you're fine.

Buy your ticket at the station on the Rock Island Line.

Will Jesus die to save me in all of my sin?

Oh, I'll let Glory to God be gonna meet him again.

I see the Rock Island line.

Here's a mighty good road.

In this iteration, it's closer to another song popularised by Lead Belly, Midnight Special, or to Rosetta Thorpe's This Train, than it is to an advertisement for a particularly good train line.

Leadbelly took the song for his own and added verses.

He also added spoken introductions, which varied over time, but eventually coalesced into something like this.

Man cut right-handed, he stands opposite side of the other man, the other cut left-handed, he stands the other side.

And boys are gonna sing about that rock-island line, which is a mighty good road to ride.

And in that road, the man is gonna talk to the depot agent when he's coming out to cut with the rock iron line freight train, coming back from New Lane this way.

That man blows his whistle down there differently when men blow whistles here because he talks to the depot agent and tell him something.

When that switchboard falls over that line, that means where that freight train is going to hold.

Man, gonna talk to him.

I got goats, I got sheep, I got hogs, I got cows, I got horses, I got all livestock, I got all livestock.

People eaten and let him get by.

When he get by, he got on, they're gonna tell him he's going on now.

I fooled you, I fooled you, I got.

And it's that song, an advertising jingle that had become a gospel song, that had become a song about a trickster figure of a train driver, that Lonnie Donegan performed with members of Chris Barber's jazz band.

The song had become popular among Trad Jazzers, and one version of Rock Island Line that Donnegan would definitely have heard is George Melly's version from 1951.

Unlike Donnegan's version, this was never a hit, and Melly later admitted that this lack of success was one of the reasons he wasn't a particular fan of Donnegan.

But Donnegan definitely attended a concert where Melly performed the song several years before recording his own version.

Melly's version was so unsuccessful, in fact, that it seems never to have been reissued in any format that will play on modern equipment.

It's not only never been released as a download or on CD, it's never even been released on vinyl to the best of my knowledge.

and it's never been digitised by any of the many resources I consult for Archival 78, so for the first time I'm unable to play an excerpt of a track I'm talking about.

The only digital copy of it I've ever been able to find out about was when an internet radio show devoted to Old 78 played it on one episode nearly six years ago, but the MP3 of that episode is no longer in the station's archives, and the DJ hasn't responded to my emails.

Sorry about that.

So I've no idea to what extent George Melly's version was responsible for Donegan choosing that song to record.

But it's safe to say that Melly's version didn't have whatever magic Donegan's had that made him into arguably the most influential British musician of his generation.

Donegan's version starts similarly to Leadbelly's, but he tells the story differently.

Now, this here's a story about the Rock Island line.

Now, Rock Island Line, she runs down into New Orleans, and just outside of New Orleans there's a big toll gate and all the trains that go through the toll gate while they gotta pay the man some money but of course if you've got certain things on board you're okay you don't have to pay the man nothing And just now we see a train, she coming down the line and when she come up to the toll gate, the driver he shout down to the man, he say, I got pigs, I got horses, I got cows, I got sheep, I got all livestock, I got all livestock, I got all livestock.

And the man say, well, you're alright, boy, just get on through, you don't have to pay me nothing.

And the train go through.

And when you go through the tall gate, the train get up a little bit of steam and a little bit of speed.

And when the driver thinks he's safely on the other side, you shout back down the line to the man.

He said, I fooled you.

I fooled you.

In his version, the line runs down to New Orleans.

which is not where the real-life Rock Island line runs.

Billy Bragg suggests in his excellent book on Skiffle that this was a mishearing by Donnegan of Muline from one of Lead Belly's recordings.

And instead of having to wait in the hole, wait at the side while another train goes past, the driver lies in order to avoid paying a toll, which wasn't a feature on American railways.

Amazingly, Donnegan's version of the song's intro became the standard, even for American musicians, who presumably had some idea of of American geography or the working of American railways.

Here, for example, is the start of Johnny Cash's version from 1957.

Now, this here is a story about the Rock Island Line.

Well, the Rock Island Line, she runs down into New Orleans.

There's a big toll gate down there, and you know, if you got certain things on board when you go through the toll gate, Well, you don't have to pay the man no toll.

Well, a train driver, he pulled up to the toll gate, and the man hollered and asked him what all he had on board and he said

i got livestock i got livestock i got cows i got pigs i got sheep i got mules i got

all

livestock

well they said you're all right boy you don't have to pay no toll you just

version successful Rather, it was the way it became a wailing, caterwauling whirlwind of energy, unlike anything else ever previously recorded by a British musician, and far more visceral even than most American rock and roll records of the period.

Rock Island Line, She's a Mighty Good Road,

Rock Island Line was originally put out as an album track on the Chris Barber album, but it was released as a single under Donegan's name a year later, and shot to number one in the UK charts.

But while it seemed like it was just a novelty hit at first, it soon became apparent that it was much more than that.

And it could be argued that, other than Rock Around the Clock, it was the most important single record we've covered here, because Rock Island Lyn created the Skiffle Craze, and without the Skiffle Craze, everything would be totally different.

Soon there were dozens of bands up and down the country playing whitebread versions of 1920s and 30s black American folk songs.

The thing about the Skiffle Craze was that, unlike every popular music format before, and most since, skiffle could be emulated by anyone.

It helped if you had a guitar or a banjo, of course, or maybe a harmonica, but the other instruments that were typically used were made out of household items.

A washboard played with a thimble, a teachest bass made with a tea chest and a broom handle, possibly a jug or a comb and paper.

Of course, ironically, many of these things later became obsolete, and now the only place you're likely to find a washboard is in a music shop, being sold at an outrageously high price for people who want to play skiffle music.

This was in stark contrast to other musical genres.

An electric guitar, or a piano, or a saxophone, or trumpet, or what have you, required a significant investment, money that most people simply didn't have.

Because one thing we've not mentioned yet, but which is hugely important here, is just how poor Britain was in 1954.

The USA was going through a post-war boom, because it was the only major industrialised nation in the world that hadn't had much of its industrial capacity destroyed in the war, and so it had become the world's salesman.

If you wanted to buy consumer goods of any type, you bought American, because America still had factories, and it had people who could work in them, rather than having to rebuild bombed-out cities.

Much of the story of rock and roll ties in with this.

This is the time when America was in the ascendant as a world power.

The UK, on the other hand, had gone through two devastating wars in a forty-year period, and basically had to rebuild all its major cities from scratch.

And it wasn't helped by the US suddenly, in August 1945, withdrawing all its help for Britain in what had been the Lend-Lease programme.

Fifty-five per cent of the UK's GDP in the Second World War had been devoted to the war, and it ended up having to take out a massive loan from the US to replace the previous aid it had been given.

That loan was agreed in 1946, and the the final instalment of it was paid in 2006.

The result of this economic hardship was that the post-war years were a time of terrible deprivation in the UK, to the extent that rationing only ended in July 1954, nine years after World War II ended, and a week before Rock Island Line was recorded.

In fact, rationing in the UK ended on the same day that Elvis Presley recorded That's Alright Mama.

So if we want to draw a line in the sand and say this is where the 1950s of the popular imagination, as opposed to the 1950s of the calendar, started, that would be as good a date as any to set.

Bear all this in mind as the story goes forward, and it'll explain a lot about British attitudes to America in particular.

Britain looked to America with a combination of awe and envy, resentment and star-struck admiration, and a lot of that comes from the way that the two countries were developing economically during this time.

So around the country, teenagers were looking for an outlet for their music, and they could easily see themselves as Lonnie Donegan, the lad from Scotland brought up in London.

Half the teenagers in the country brought themselves guitars or made basses out of tea chests.

And Lonnie Donegan was even a big star in the US.

All the music papers were saying so.

Maybe, just maybe,

it was possible for you to go and become famous in the US as well.

Because, surprisingly, Donnegan's record did make the top ten in the pop charts in the USA, in what became the first example of a long line of white British men with guitars gaining commercial success in the US by selling the music of the US's own black people back to white teenagers.

Donnegan wasn't a big star over there, but he was close enough that the British music papers, buoyed by patriotism, could pretend he was.

In fact, Donnegan wasn't quite a one-hit wonder in the USA.

He was a two-hit wonder, first with Rock Island Line and a few years later with the novelty song Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight?

But he still made more of an impact there than any other British musician of his generation.

Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?

If your mother says don't chew it, do you swallow it in spite?

Can you catch it on your tonsils when you heave it left and right?

Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?

Any version of Rock Island Line recorded by an American after 1955 would be based around Donegan's version.

Bobby Darin's first single for example, was a cover version of Donegan's record, in a reversal of the usual process which would involve British people copying the latest American hit for the domestic market.

It was the first time since Ray Noble in the 1930s that a British musician had achieved any kind of level of popular success in the USA at all, and the British music public were proud of Donegan.

Except, that is, for the Trad Jazz fans who were Donegan's original audience.

For a lot of them, Donegan was polluting the purity of the music.

The trad jazz musicians usually didn't mind this, but the purists in the music papers really, really disliked Donegan.

Not that credibility mattered.

After all, as the session guitarist Bert Whedon said to Donegan, you're the first man to have made any money out of the guitar.

Bloody well done.

And while Donegan didn't make any more than his initial £16 session fee, his fee for the entire Chris Barber album from which Rock Island Lion was taken.

From the initial recording, he did indeed become financially very successful from his follow-up hits, like Putin on the style.

That's what all the young folks are doing all the while.

And as I look around me, I'm sometimes apt to smile.

Seeing all the young folks are putting on the style

The preacher in the pulpit roars with all his might.

That was famously parodied by Peter Sellers.

And that style don't quite fit me, man.

Cause it's a bit tight under the arms.

So I think I'll go buy myself a new style.

One that's got a bit of a drip in the back.

But there's another recording of that song, which probably shows its cultural impact better.

This is a very, very low-fidelity recording of a teenage skiffle group performing the song in 1957.

Apologies for the poor quality, but it's frankly a miracle this survives at all.

Later, on the same day that recording was made, the 16-year-old boy singing lead there would be introduced properly for the first time to another teenager, who he would invite to join his skiffle group.

But it'll be a while yet before we talk about John Lennon and Paul McCartney properly.

A history of rock music in 500 Songs is written, produced and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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