Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  The very first solo black American bluesman to visit Britain, a year prior to Broonzy, was Josh White. A commitment to eulogising the plight of the black man in modern America notwithstanding, White’s style was based more on English and Irish folk and gospel, and he was experienced in mainstream cabaret – all of which made him broadly accessible. Broonzy shared enough of White’s populist sensibilities to appeal to a similarly wide audience. He was always well dressed and impeccably courteous. Even on his electric jazz-flavoured recordings from the 1940s, the big man still brought an aura of gritty authenticity to sophisticated arrangements, clean sounds and the clear diction of an effortlessly smooth vocal. Casually convincing the wide-eyed, embryonic English blues fraternity that he was indeed, as he was often billed, ‘the last of the Mississippi blues singers’, and playing for British audiences what was generally regarded back home as old-fashioned country blues, he was only doing so – on both counts – because it seemed precisely what his new friends wanted to hear. But Broonzy was no phoney and no fool either. ‘He knew that once he had come, others would follow, especially those singers who were now regarded, in his words, as “old fogies” but who could find a new audience in Britain.’3 Where White, under increasing pressure from the FBI, was sometimes afraid to air his civil rights views on public stages, Broonzy was brazen, though not without emotion: ‘For him, singing to white people songs like “Black, Brown and White” and “When Will I Get To Be A Man?” was the most moving thing,’ says Norma Waterson, of pioneering folk revivalists the Watersons. ‘The first time he sang at Hull City Hall we went backstage and met him and became friends. He came and stayed in our house the next time he was over [in 1957]. The Watersons were singing together informally at that point but we never sang for him, we just talked about music. He was very appreciative of us. Just such a nice man.’

  Broonzy’s decency was, at least on his first visit, hardly returned by his host: Wilcox charged him for rent, food, taxis and much else. A famous memoir from a man who was otherwise the very essence of humility contains the memorable conclusion that ‘I never did meet a meaner man’. On later trips he would find Chris Barber a much more affable benefactor. The leader of a popular ‘trad jazz’ band, Barber was also heavily involved in the birth of skiffle and, like his friend, sometime colleague and contemporary Alexis Korner, had been an avid collector of blues recordings. Between 1954 and 1964 Barber effectively sponsored a series of what would prove to be hugely influential tours of Britain, often including Bert’s home town of Edinburgh, by black American artists from the blues and gospel traditions: Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Slim.

  ‘From ’54 onwards most people who were musical probably came to concerts like mine anyway,’ says Barber. ‘We were the thing that was happening, the liveliest thing you could find in those days. And when we brought Big Bill with us to Edinburgh two or three times, and Sonny & Brownie were there with us once at least, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, that exposed people to them who were not preconceived blues or folk fans, just people who liked music. We did it for the love of music. Particularly with Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny & Brownie and Muddy Waters every promoter said to me, “What do you want to bring these people along for? You’d fill that hall by yourself. We can’t put any more on the ticket for someone people have never heard of – if you want to bring them along you’ll have to pay them.” So it was our gift to the British electorate! If we hadn’t paid for them, they wouldn’t have been here. Now I don’t expect a medal for that, but what I would like is not to get knocked for it, because people have said that we cashed in on the blues. We didn’t. We cashed out on it!’

  The gesture was not unappreciated. ‘I used to love listening to Brownie McGhee,’ says Bert, ‘particularly when you could see him in the flesh, at the Howff. I missed out on Big Bill Broonzy. I know people who have actually met him in real life, and I’m always envious of that.’4 Bill Broonzy fell ill with cancer on the European leg of his 1957 tour and returned to Chicago. ‘While he [had] prophesied the impending demise of the blues in his conversation, he mentioned enough singers to indicate that at the time, many blues singers were still actively working.’5 Broonzy had been canny enough to corner the nascent British blues market while he could, allowing willing recipients of his wisdom to believe in the romance that here was, indeed, the last of the Mississippi blues singers. But on his own recommendation Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee came to Britain the following year. Bill had already fulfilled his British engagements for 1957. ‘On his last appearance you could tell the voice was going,’ says Norma Waterson, ‘but he was still a great performer and an incredible guitar player. His sense of rhythm was just majestic.’ A number of the UK jazz and skiffle musicians who had become his friends organised benefit shows to pay his hospital bills. Bill passed away in August 1958. His friend and protégé Muddy Waters, a symbol of the next generation of the blues, was among those carrying the coffin.

  ‘Noisy, unsubtle, depending heavily on the repertoire of Leadbelly and Broonzy, “skiffle” was a rough out-crop from the New Orleans jazz revival of the early fifties,’ wrote one commentator.6 Some may state the case with names like Billy Fury, Johnny Kidd or Cliff Richard but Britain never did move far enough out of its grand tradition of variety to come up with anything that could seriously be said to equal the compelling power and spontaneity of rock’n’roll in America on anything like a consistent basis. Skiffle was the English equivalent: ‘folk song with a jazz beat’ as the movement’s first chronicler, Brian Bird, termed it7 – a rhythmically driving, anglicised combination of American blues, country and folk with exotic imagery and chord sequences reduced to a minimum. It was a lively alternative to jazz and the smooth balladry of the day, and it was Britain’s first post-war youth craze. Anybody could play it, and on the back of Lonnie Donegan’s infectious personality and his three million-selling debut single ‘Rock Island Line’ thousands were inspired to do just that. It is no exaggeration to say that guitar playing in Britain, as a mass popular activity, can be traced back to Donegan – ‘the first king of Britpop’8 – and the skiffle craze he inspired.

  The word ‘skiffle’ itself can be traced back to 1926, when it was a term associated with the ‘rent parties’ run by poor black people in the northern United States, where music was played using low-cost or makeshift instruments.9 In 1948 a Harlem newspaper editor named Dan Burley formed a group to record some of the rent party music he recalled from his youth in the twenties and thirties. Calling themselves the Dan Burley Skiffle Group, their number included one Walter ‘Brownie’ McGhee on guitar.

  Born in Tennessee in 1915, McGhee had grown up in a family where music was at least a part-time occupation. By the time he was eight, he had mastered guitar, piano and foot-treadle organ and was singing regularly in a Baptist quartet at church. Having left school in his teens he hitch-hiked around the Smokey Mountains with guitar and kazoo and took casual work as an entertainer, travelling with medicine shows and eventually winding up, in 1940, at the home of guitarist Blind Boy Fuller in North Carolina. Staying with Fuller at the time was his similarly impaired protégé – a young man from Georgia named Saunders Terrell, otherwise known as Sonny Terry. Sonny played harmonica well, sang with an intriguing waywardness and, like Broonzy, had appeared at John Hammond’s ‘Spirituals to Swing’ bash at the Carnegie Hall in 1938. Whether he was totally blind is a matter of some conjecture, but he hit it off in a workable fashion with McGhee – whose eyesight was fine, but who had limped since childhood – and that year the pair travelled to New York to cut some records. Following Blind Boy Fuller’s death in 1941 they settled there permanently.

  From the streets of Harlem they moved quickly on to concerts and Broadway musicals and began a loose, often fractious but remarkably enduring partnership that lasted almost up to Sonny’s death in 1986. During the forties, Brownie would record prolifically under his own name, as a duo with Sonny and as an accompanist for many others.
‘At first, McGhee was a country blues performer in the tradition of Big Bill Broonzy, but as the years went by he smoothed-out his voice – deleting the harshness of Big Bill’s delivery – and sang with a tenderness and whimsical humour that contrasted beautifully with Terry’s more primitive work.’10 The Dan Burley session was par for the course and none of those involved could possibly have expected such a harmless exercise in ghetto nostalgia to trigger a mainstream phenomenon thousands of miles and half a world away. Indirectly as may be, it did just that.

  Chris Barber’s recording career, like Lonnie Donegan’s, began in earnest in 1954. But three years earlier, and three years after the Dan Burley session, in 1951, he had cut a brace of 78s for the Esquire label. One disc was shared with the Crane River Jazz Band, with his side credited to Chris Barber’s Jazz Band. The other disc (which apparently also featured Lonnie Donegan) was credited to Chris Barber’s Washboard Wonders. These performances were, as one authority notes, ‘not skiffle, but steps in that direction’.11 The Crane River boys had formed in 1949 around brothers Ken and Bill Colyer and were dedicated to the resolutely purist New Orleans jazz sound of Bunk Johnson, although it is believed they also featured a ‘skiffle’ segment in their shows. Indeed, even Donegan credits Bill Colyer with making the connection to the Burley sound and thus giving a name to the novelty section of their show. In 1949 the Colyers had also met Barber’s friend Alexis Korner, now widely regarded as a founding father of British blues. Along with some others they would meet regularly at Korner’s house during this period and, with Alexis putting off the inconvenience of actually learning his instrument by bluffing away on a guitar openly tuned to B flat, which required little more than one finger at a time, would jam around on the theme of a Leadbelly song called ‘Midnight Special’.12 In a few years it would be the proud property of every gang of kids with washboard, tea-chest bass and cheap guitar between them, the length and breadth of the country.

  But who was this Leadbelly anyway? With no little irony, in the very year, 1949, that had seen Colyer and Korner fool around with his songs while the then Tony Donegan (he changed his forename after seeing bluesman Lonnie Johnson in 1952) got together for the first time in a band with Chris Barber, the man who would effectively bankroll the next decade for the lot of them passed away. That same year he had played the jazz clubs of Paris – his first and only visit to Europe. Had he lived longer he would undoubtedly have travelled to Britain and enjoyed the same respect given to Broonzy, Sonny & Brownie and all those who followed and, perhaps also, a little of the massive success that his songs would generate for the Brit-skifflers.

  Hudson Ledbetter, known universally as Leadbelly, was born on the Texas – Louisiana border in 1889. He was ‘discovered’ during the second of two prison sentences – the first for murder, the second for attempted murder – by folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan, who were searching the jailhouses of the deep south for material of interest to record for the Library of Congress. With a pardon purportedly won at least partly through the power of song, he was employed by the pair and taken to New York. As a musical find, the Lomaxes had struck gold. Leadbelly could play any number of instruments, but principally twelve-string guitar. Defining what blues scholars now regard as a ‘songster’ as opposed to a performer of some strict discipline of the blues, he had amassed a vast repertoire of songs from the rural south of his youth to which he was constantly adding refinements of his own, together with writing new songs and picking up material from whatever fresh sources presented themselves. ‘It was his apparently inexhaustible collection of older songs and tunes that most fascinated the northern audience, embracing as it did everything from versions of old European ballads through Cajun-influenced dance tunes and sentimental pop to dozens of black work songs and field hollers, southern ballads, gospel, prison songs, many tough blues and even cowboy songs.’ By turns spine-chilling, barn-storming, nostalgic and socially aware, Leadbelly was the real thing: a walking, talking microcosm of America’s folklore tradition.

  In the 1920s he had, like Josh White, spent time with Blind Lemon Jefferson and later plied his songs in the red light districts of towns around Louisiana and Texas. In New York he mixed and recorded with both Josh White and with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and, like them, he was recording simultaneously and quite separately both for the growing white ‘folk’ audience and for the ‘race’ market. He would also rub shoulders with Woody Guthrie, godfather of the white troubadours and protest singers of the 1960s, whose songs on the grand and nebulous themes of freedom, rambling and such like were a further conduit into first skiffle and subsequently the British and American folk revivals. Like Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly was unafraid of writing songs that dealt with racial prejudice. And, as with Broonzy, his recordings started appearing on British labels from 1950. If Broonzy’s music was, even in its most down-home form, considerably more polished in its presentation than Leadbelly’s, between them they had pretty much all the repertoire and truth that a nation of British youngsters with three chords would require.

  Leadbelly may have been an interesting curio for Ken Colyer at the start of the fifties, but Ken was obsessed with the sound of New Orleans, and rejoined the Merchant Navy (with whom he had earlier served national service) with the sole object of getting there. He returned in early 1953 and worked briefly with Chris Barber (who had meanwhile turned professional) in a line-up which included Alexis Korner and Lonnie Donegan and with a repertoire that featured skiffle as an interval item within the dominant jazz set. It was too many egos for one band.

  In July 1954, two months after Colyer and Barber had inevitably split, the Chris Barber ensemble recorded their first 33rpm LP, a ten-inch entitled New Orleans Joys. They wanted to include a couple of ‘different’ numbers that had been going down well in their live act. As Lonnie Donegan’s own 1998 press material put it: ‘The A&R man thought it was a waste of time and wanted them to stick to recording the jazz album they were being paid to make. After a little cajoling he relented and left the excited band together with a “live” mike (always a dangerous combination). Skiffle was born.’

  Frenetic takes of the traditional ‘John Henry’ and the Leadbelly train song ‘Rock Island Line’ were recorded that day. The album was issued in 1954, while a 78rpm single release of the coupling (credited to the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group) sneaked out around Christmas the following year. Peaking at number eight in January 1956, it spent twenty-two weeks in the UK charts, single-handedly ushered in the nationwide craze and also made the US Top 20 – a feat unheard of at the time for a British artist. As one commentator has pointed out, ‘George Melly had recorded the song a couple of years earlier and had provoked no such interest.’13 Having honed his routine in the intimate coffee bars of London’s Soho district, Donegan found himself playing to huge audiences (and for correspondingly huge fees) in the States, sharing bills with the likes of Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and the Harlem Globe Trotters: ‘I was offered a gig in New York for $2000 – a massive sum then. Twenty quid would have done!’ As had happened previously to Ken Colyer in New Orleans, Donegan would also find himself vilified and on one occasion run out of town by his own promoter for hanging around with black musicians and buying blues records. Such a heinous crime in deep south America was still a rare luxury back home: ‘We had to scrabble for everything in Britain. I used to go to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which had a Library of Congress section with thousands of “ethnic” records.’14

  Between 1956 and 1962 Donegan went on to rack up no fewer than thirty-four UK singles chart placings, including seventeen Top 10s, wisely broadening his repertoire when the initial craze for skiffle subsided. In 1957 BBC radio, responding to an obvious demand, launched Saturday Skiffle Club, which enjoyed a weekly audience of two and a half million. Its producer Jimmy Grant was quoted in the Melody Maker at the time as concerned that ‘the trouble with most amateur skiffle groups is that they lack basic musicianship’. But then that was the whole appeal of the thing. By Oc
tober 1958 the show had quietly dropped the word ‘Skiffle’ from its title but remained an oasis for live, British pop music in an otherwise dusty broadcasting schedule and in an era long before commercial radio, pirate radio or even BBC regional stations. A snowball was rolling slowly but surely down a hill.

  Made by an awe-struck schoolboy named Frank Coia, unique reel-to-reel recordings of a series of folk club performances in Glasgow spanning 1962 to 1965 document the presence in Bert Jansch’s early professional repertoire of many songs written by or associated with Broonzy, Leadbelly and Brownie McGhee. But, unusual amongst his peers who made their names in the folk clubs, the jazz scene or the embryonic British blues movement of the early sixties, Bert had no significant involvement in the skiffle craze. He did once comment that, as a kid trying to make guitars, he was inspired not so much by a fascination with the instrument as by the very sound of skiffle: ‘Lonnie Donegan was about my first influence into the whole world of music,’ he concluded.15 But although practically everyone else of similar age and musical disposition, from future members of The Beatles to fusion virtuoso John McLaughlin, were members of a skiffle group, Bert Jansch never was. In his hands, the songs of Broonzy and Leadbelly could be played in darker and more intriguing ways than a three-chord thrum, a 4/4 backbeat and a singalong refrain. More by virtue of chance than veneration, having quickly found his Hofner unsuitable to folk music, Bert had exchanged it for a Zenith, a model of guitar once marketed as a ‘Josh White’ but, by 1959/60, inevitably repromoted as a ‘Lonnie Donegan’. Within three months it was stolen. Bert continued to pay the h.p. instalments but it was years before he would own a guitar again.