LONNIE DONEGAN: Lonnie Donegan, who died on Monday aged 71, was the first British pop superstar, and the founding father of British pop music, the musician who provided the original inspiration for John Lennon, Paul McCartney and a host of others.
By the time the Beatles shook up the music world in the mid-1960s, Donegan's glory days were over, and he had retreated into comedy and cabaret, but, between 1956 and 1962, he notched up an incredible 26 hits.
Donegan was a musical phenomenon. As the leader of the skiffle craze in the late 1950s, he inspired the formation of literally thousands of do-it-yourself bands, and was directly responsible for the 1960s pop explosion that was to severely damage his own career.
Ironically, Rock Island Line, the song that transformed his life - and the history of British pop - was neither British nor contemporary. It had been written by the great black American folksinger Huddie Ledbetter, better known as "Leadbelly", and, like so much else of his work, had been rediscovered in 1933, when the American folklorists John and Alan Lomax stumbled on Leadbelly serving time for attempted murder in the Louisiana state penitentiary.
Donegan had begun playing the song in the early 1950s, during his days as banjoist with the Chris Barber Jazz Band, which specialised in New Orleans "trad" classics, but also included a splinter-group that bashed away at "skiffle" versions of American folk songs and blues during the intervals between the main band sets.
Along with John Henry, another railroad ballad from the days of slavery in the American south, Rock Island Line found its way on to the Barber band's 1954 album New Orleans Joys, though it was not until 18 months later that the two tracks were released, under Donegan's name, as a novelty single.
The reaction was extraordinary. Rock Island Line sold more than a million copies, and became one of the first British pop records to break into the American top-10 chart. It had a vitality, a rhythmic intensity and a simplicity that - at the time - was unique in British pop.
Using a simple line-up of strummed guitar, double bass and drums, Donegan drawled, and then sang, his way through a story about a train driver on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific railroad fooling the inspector at a toll gate outside New Orleans. It was an extraordinarily exciting, brave and gutsy recording and the wonder of it was that anyone with a cheap acoustic guitar, and the mastery of three basic chords, could try to imitate the Donegan style.
The man responsible was born Anthony James Donegan in Glasgow. His mother was Irish and his father Scottish, a violinist who, at one time, played with the Scottish National Orchestra, and later joined the Merchant Navy. In 1933, the family moved to East Ham, London, and it was there, after the second World War, that the teenage Donegan became an enthusiastic fan of the new, trad jazz movement. He learned to play the guitar and the banjo, and formed the Anthony Donegan - later Tony Donegan - Jazz Band. He was called up for national service in 1949. In the army, he joined yet another band, the Wolverines, this time as a drummer.
After his military discharge, Donegan changed his stage name again, this time to Lonnie, after his idol, the American blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson, with whom he had once played. He then joined the Ken Colyer Jazzmen, and the skiffle movement was born.
Jazz clubs in the early 1950s were often unlicensed, and the musicians would take regular breaks so their audiences could nip out for a drink in the nearest pub. Some entertainment had to be provided for those patrons who remained behind, so Colyer and his band began to play and sing American folk blues songs. They took the term "skiffle" from a favourite record, Home Town Skiffle, a compilation of American jug band styles and western swing.
Before long, however, the Jazzmen split up because of Colyer's insistence that they should play in what he regarded as the correct traditional style, and the entire band, including Donegan, left to regroup themselves as the Chris Barber Jazz Band, which gave its first performance at the 100 Club, London, on May 31st, 1954. When they recorded the New Orleans Joys album, Barber insisted the record should include a full representation of the group's work - including skiffle songs, with Donegan singing them.
With its astonishing success, Donegan became a major star, and soon quit the Barber band for a solo career, and a contract with Pye Records. He moved away from blues and jazz to concentrate exclusively on skiffle, transforming dozens of American folk songs by adding in a hefty beat (hefty, at least, by mid-1950s standards) and his distinctive nasal twang. For six years, everything he recorded became a hit, and, as songs like Lost John, Bring A Little Water Sylvie, Cumberland Gap and Grand Coolie Dam followed each other into the bestseller charts, do-it-yourself skiffle bands sprang up across the country attempting to imitate his style.
By the late 1950s, however, it was becoming clear that Donegan was not just interested in popularising the songs of black Americans like Leadbelly, or white Americans like Woody Guthrie. He was evolving into an all-round entertainer and comedian, in the tradition of British music-hall, as he showed in 1957 with his comic song, Putting On The Style, and his first excursion into pantomime.
The following year, he appeared at a royal variety performance, and, in 1959, recorded his million-selling Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight, a new version of a boy scout favourite he had sung as a child. It reached number three in the British charts, and number five in the United States. In 1960, Donegan sold more than a million records in Britain alone, with another novelty song, My Old Man's A Dustman.
In August 1962, he notched up his last big seller, Pick A Bale Of Cotton; but, in December, when he released a comic follow-up, The Market Song, recorded with Max Miller, he found his string of hits had suddenly ended. Members of a former skiffle group, called the Quarrymen, had changed their name and style, and made their first chart entry with Love Me Do. Donegan was not amused. "The Beatles' first records were old-fashioned, archaic rock 'n' roll," he recalled, "and I was resentful at the way they stopped my cash flow." Donegan's glory days may have been over, but he kept on going.
For the last two decades, Donegan spent most of his time in Malaga, Spain. In 1990, he became a father for the seventh time, when his third wife, Sharon, gave birth to a son.
Lonnie Donegan may have been the godfather of British pop, but, at heart, he was an updated music-hall performer, adrift in the wrong era. He received an Ivor Novello lifetime achievement award in 1997, and was made an MBE in 2000. Donegan is survived by Sharon and their sons, Peter, David and Andrew; by Fiona and Corrina, the children of his first marriage; and by Anthony and Juanita, the children of his second marriage.
Anthony James "Lonnie" Donegan:, born April 29th, 1931; died November 4th, 2002