Nineteen-fifty-four was a big year for music. In Memphis, Elvis Presley was beginning to work his particular magic on the American forms that he loved, and across the Atlantic in London, a certain Lonnie Donegan was doing exactly the same thing. Presley was to rule over rock 'n' roll and Donegan was to preside equally regally over a movement they would call skiffle. And while both these terms had been used before, they had never quite signified such major crazes - each one provoked separately by these inspired pioneers.
With the release of Muleskinner Blues - Donegan's first studio album in 20 years, the man is now up for some inevitable rediscovery and reappraisal. A major influence on popular music, the history books announce him as not only the founder of skiffle but also as the first real British pop-star and teen idol. Not that Donegan particularly relishes any of these titles. He comes, after all, from that period his friend Van Morrison sings about as "the days before rock 'n' roll". Not one for retrospective labelling, therefore, Donegan remembers that early period as an innocent time, when musicians like himself were unaware of their commercial possibilities. It was, he says, entirely to do with a discovery and love of American music.
"The first blues I ever heard was Josh White, and the first important record was The House of the Rising Sun. I heard it on the BBC on The Radio Rhythm Club, which was on every Friday night. It was the only rhythmic music programme on the air, and it was Harry Parry and The Radio Rhythm Club Sextet. He was a sort of Benny Goodmanesque and I'm sure they were quite nice, but they didn't excite me particularly. They also played records and there would be a jazz record and a broadly-speaking folk record - it was American folk music and that's what I waited for. It just caught my ear.
"Josh White was the first. From there I heard things like Frankie and Johnnie and Abdul Abulbul Amir - all sorts of things like that, and that's what brought me into it."
Born in Glasgow in 1931, Anthony James Donnegan had no major musical ambitions and only bought his first guitar having been almost forced into it by a work colleague who wanted to get rid of one. He recalls that the guitar cost 30 shillings and that he paid 10 shillings of it himself, "brainwashing" his mother into providing the rest. And so, guitar in hand, and listening to the radio for any signs of jazz and in particular the folk-blues of Leadbelly and Josh White, Donegan was already something of a unique figure.
"It was just me really. At that time I was about 14 and there weren't many kids like me. I say `kids' but of course in those days a 14-year-old was at work! You were a young man! I was already out earning my living in a stockbroker's office in London and there was nobody to relate to there except that one guy who was very sophisticated and had the guitar. But then I got introduced to a jazz club. I remember The Freddie Randall Jazz Band was playing, and the night I went they had a blues singer called Beryl Bryden - God rest her soul - she just died a couple of months ago. She sang St Louis Blues and so by the time I was about 16 I was really hooked into jazz and the blues. After that I just went around all the record shops and bought anything that said "blues" on it. Most of them were old jazz records. Then Chris Barber was getting a little amateur band together just to play in the back room - no question of an audience or anything - and because he didn't have a banjo player, I went out and bought a banjo. Chris taught me how to play it."
There are many versions of how exactly skiffle started, and Donegan will politely correct any misconception you may have. He is especially wary of what he repeatedly refers to as "journalese" and is consequently more than willing to set the record straight himself. Having spent his national service in Vienna, Donegan came out of the army at the beginning of the 1950s and formed his own group called The Tony Donnegan Jazz Band, which played the circuit of jazz clubs in the West End of London. They became known, and so Donegan began to take things rather more seriously.
"I said to my band that the only way we were going to get any better was to give up our jobs and spend all our time learning to play. Apart from the bass player, nobody wanted to know. Chris Barber was feeling the same way about his band, and Monty Sunshine was feeling the same way. His trumpet player was Ken Colyer and he had decided the only way for him to get better was to take a boat to New Orleans and sit in with the real musicians and learn from them.
"So while he was away doing that, the rest of us would-be professionals started to get together at my wife's father's house until we felt that we'd got to what we thought was a bloody good standard. Then we tried out the band, free of charge, at various clubs and brought the roof down. We called ourselves The Barber Sunshine Hot Six - and not many people know that.
"Eventually Ken Colyer came back and joined. Anyway, we began playing for our own benefit in the interval - banjo, guitar and bass. Bill Colyer (Ken's brother) was on washboard. And people liked it and it gradually achieved a popularity of its own. Then we had to give that part of it a title and we called ourselves the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group."
Skiffle became a massive craze. In British terms it predated rock 'n'roll and, in many ways, tended to outperform it. The new rock 'n' rollers such as Tommy Steele were to remain in the shadow of Donegan for the rest of the 1950s and could only watch as the skiffle king enjoyed hit after hit. Donegan even managed to get a record banned by the BBC: Diggin' my Potatoes was considered far too suggestive in those very proper days. The most extraordinary thing, however, was that Donegan was also a hit in the US and, for a British act, this was absolutely unheard of. According to singer George Melly in his book Revolt into Style: "Donegan was indeed the first British artist who managed to sell musical coals to a transatlantic Newcastle." The record that did it was an old Leadbelly song called Rock Island Line.
"It was a total shock and as usual in showbiz it was a total accident. We had made an album and it had been a successful jazz album. They had put out single tracks from it and eventually the only one left was Rock Island Line. They put it out as a single simply because the album had been successful and they just threw it up against the wall. And it turned to gold.
"Then suddenly, out of left field there was this demand for my services. It wasn't a question of being a star - it was a demand for my services. I got a telegram from the Perry Como Show and that was the first job I took outside the jazz band. I was flown to New York and thrown in the deep end and, while I was away, the next record went to No 2, so I got a cable from England saying come back you berk, you're No 2 in the charts! So there was no time for standing around preening in the mirror."
Donegan had an obvious appeal. His delivery was energetic and often frenzied and the instrumentation in these relatively simple songs (at least in terms of the chords) meant that, in theory, anybody might attempt to copy him. Many people did, and the legendary street-corner skiffle bands began to appear all over the place. Among those caught up in the craze were John Lennon and Paul McCartney - both of whom were quick to acknowledge Donegan's influence. The Kinks, The Who and just about every English act of that vintage were also inevitably Donegan fans and have made no secret of it. In Ireland too, Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison were among those who took to the guitar and the music of Leadbelly, largely through Donegan's example.
FOR Donegan however, being at the centre of a craze was never easy. "It was a two-edged sword, all of that. I was very glad that I was reaching people with my music. I was a disciple, if you will, of the Afro-American music. It was my whole purpose in life as a prophet of that music to take it to the masses and give everybody a chance to be converted to this wonderful music. To find that people were doing it was a great satisfaction. But the fame side was a nuisance - it just held me up. I couldn't go to the pictures and I couldn't go to a jazz club without everybody wanting me to get up and sing, and that was a pain in the arse. I think you'll find people like Van think the same way."
As the skiffle craze began to fade, Donegan found his next slew of hits much closer to home. He began to release songs such as My Old Man's a Dustman and Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (on the bedpost overnight).
People such as Tommy Steele and Joe Brown were to follow him once more into what the writer Charlie Gillett has described as an "instant folk culture".
Regional accents were back and cheeky chappies appeared everywhere. Again Donegan was successful - even in America - with songs that many had dismissed as simply comic songs.
"Could I replace the word `comic' with `fun'?" I'd always sung fun songs and one of the first was Abdul Abulbul Amir which I heard on the radio.
"So from the very beginning it was House of the Rising Sun one week and Abdul Abulbul Amir the next. Even before that I had learned Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (on the bedpost overnight) when I was in the Boy Scouts. We went trekking and camping and we had to pull everything in carts. And to get everybody pulling they would sing what were called trekking songs. This was one of them and I assumed it was a folk song.
"When I started doing it everybody thought it was a laugh. We did it at a show in Oxford, the record company stuck a microphone up through the stage and recorded the thing live and bingo! It wasn't a hit in the US until a few years later when a group called the Brooke Brothers were doing a programme in Boston with Arnie Woo-Woo Ginsberg. He was running a competition looking for the wackiest record title they had ever heard. Anyway, the Brooke Brothers said they knew the funniest of all and nobody believed them. So they got Pye Records to send one over, Arnie put it on, never stopped playing it and then in a couple of weeks' time it was the US charts."
Now living in Spain, Donegan has outlasted many of his contemporaries and seems quite unaffected by a number of heart-attacks that has almost reached double figures. The voice and the energy are still there and, as far as this particular old hand is concerned, he's ready for anything. Another No 1 hit might seem unlikely at this point, but he knows better than most that some kind of Lonnie Donegan comeback is just another accident away.
"In showbusiness it's all total chance. It has nothing to do with talent. I mean there is no shortage of talent in this world. What causes that talent to come before the public is accidental. It's an amalgam of opportunity, timing, mood and so many ingredients going into that pot that it's a wonder anybody ever becomes successful. It's all accident - life is one big accident. I mean I'm still here aren't I? And I shouldn't really be."
Muleskinner Blues is on the Capo/RCA label