Lonnie Donegan

In mid-1950s Britain before anyone in England had heard of rock 'n roll, Lonnie Donegan, the King of Skiffle, was the most exciting and most influential artist in the UK charts.   His music had an enormous influence in a generation of British groups and artists including Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones. 

Lonnie was born Anthony James Donegan on 29 April 1931 in Glasgow, the son of a Scot, Peter John Donegan, violinist, and his Irish wife, Mary Josephine, née Deighan. Although his father played with the Royal National Scottish Orchestra, he did not encourage his son's musical abilities as he regarded his own employment as insecure. Seeking more regular employment, the family moved to London when Donegan was three, and his father played in dance quartets on cruise liners. During the Second World War the latter served in the merchant navy but this only increased the alienation between himself and his wife. They divorced after the war (Donegan's father subsequently becoming a company secretary) and Donegan and his mother moved to Altrincham, Cheshire.

In 1946 Donegan became an office boy for a stockbroker in the City of London. A defining moment came when he went with a friend to hear Beryl Bryden singing with the Freddy Randall Jazz Band at the Cook's Ferry Inn in Edmonton. From that moment he wanted to be an entertainer, singing jazz and blues. In 1949 he was called up for national service and became a lance corporal in the Royal Army Medical Corps, being posted in Southampton and then Woolwich. He left the barracks to play jazz when he could, and, encouraged by the trombonist Chris Barber, became proficient on both banjo and guitar. A posting to Vienna stopped his extracurricular activities, but he met American servicemen and listened to the American Forces Network, acquiring a love of country music.

Donegan was demobilized in 1951 and worked in Millets army surplus store in Oxford Street, London. He discovered Woody Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter (‘Leadbelly’), and Muddy Waters through John and Alan Lomax's field recordings for the Library of Congress, copies of which were held at the American embassy. He formed his own Tony Donegan Jazz Band and when the Musicians' Union prevented its members from working with the American blues singer Lonnie Johnson, the then non-union Donegan was booked as the opening act at the Royal Festival Hall. The compère, stumbling on his words, introduced him as ‘Lonnie Donegan’, and the name stuck. A few months later Donegan joined a reconstituted Chris Barber Jazz Band and they rehearsed at a public house in Mile End, owned by John Thomas Tyler, the father of Donegan's girlfriend, Maureen Doris Tyler. Donegan and Maureen Tyler married on 31 March 1955, when Maureen was nineteen, and their daughter, Fiona, was born the following year.

The Chris Barber Jazz Band was renamed Ken Colyer's Jazzmen when the trumpeter Ken Colyer joined, but Colyer was opinionated and argumentative and when one day he shouted ‘You're all sacked!’, they took him at his word, Barber forming a new band with Donegan, again under the name the Chris Barber Jazz Band. During his tenure with both bands, Donegan was featured in a short set playing folk and blues music with a stripped-down accompaniment. The washboard player, Bill Colyer (Ken's brother), called it a skiffle session, taking the name from Dan Burley's record of ‘Skiffle Blues’ (1946), although the word had been used twenty years before that for jam sessions at rent parties in New Orleans.

In 1954 Chris Barber's Jazz Band recorded an eight-track, 10 inch LP for Decca Records, New Orleans Joys. Against Decca's wishes, Barber insisted on including some skiffle songs (credited to the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group), featuring Donegan on guitar, Barber on double bass, and Beryl Bryden on a washboard played with thimbles. Although only two and a half minutes long, their version of Leadbelly's ‘Rock Island Line’ included a one minute narration, three verses, and five choruses. The track was not issued as a single until 1956, when its originality captivated first British and then American audiences. 

‘Rock Island Line’ made the UK charts in January 1956, just a few weeks before Elvis Presley set the country alight with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Compared to the bland but competent balladeers and novelty singers making the other hit records, Donegan and Presley appeared like men possessed and, although Donegan dismissed rock'n'roll, there was a similarity between their music. They made impassioned and frenetic records, singing as though their very lives depended upon it.

Rather than have Donegan record some new tracks, Decca next released ‘Diggin' My Potatoes’ as a single, and the record was banned by the BBC because of its suggestive lyrics. Nevertheless, because of the success of ‘Rock Island Line’, Donegan was invited to appear in America and he was a guest alongside Ronald Reagan, then a film actor, on The Perry Como Show. Reagan had to ask, ‘What is a Lonnie Donegan?’, which led into a performance of ‘Rock Island Line’. 

Back in the UK, Donegan was in demand for solo appearances, which caused friction with Barber. Donegan left to form his own skiffle group and his second hit record, ‘Lost John’, for Pye Records, reached number two. The disc jockey John Peel later commented, ‘Lonnie was unlike anything we had heard before. Lonnie Donegan let you know that there was a mad joy to be had from popular music where you could shriek along with his stuff and let go’.

Because skiffle music was relatively easy to play, youngsters throughout the UK were buying acoustic guitars, playing washboards, and making tea chest basses. Donegan kept ahead of the pack by organizing his own Lonnie Donegan Skiffle and Folk Music Clubs in British cities, including one at the Cavern in Liverpool, which was run by Mick Groves, later a member of the Spinners. Also, unlike the other skifflers, he released a stream of very commercial records, including ‘Bring a Little Water, Sylvie’, ‘My Dixie Darling’, and ‘Grand Coulee Dam’, as well as the number ones ‘Cumberland Gap’ and the double-sided ‘Gamblin' Man’/‘Puttin' on the Style’ (both sides of which were recorded live at the London Palladium). His extended-play release Skiffle Session and his album Showcase (both 1956) sold enough copies to enter the UK singles chart. 

Instead of embracing rock'n'roll, he updated ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight?’ (a song originally composed in 1924 that he had heard as a boy scout) and ‘My Old Man's a Dustman’ (originally ‘My Old Man's a Fireman on the Elder Dempster Line’), which in 1960 became the first British single to enter the UK chart at number one. Donegan came to view both songs as millstones as well as milestones, and the only way he could maintain their freshness was by writing new verses for concert appearances, usually with his road manager, Peter Buchanan. Buchanan wrote a special verse about the dustbins at Buckingham Palace for the royal variety performance in 1960.

In 1960 Donegan revised a heroic sea song, ‘The Wreck of the Sloop John B’, and, with an orchestral arrangement from Wally Scott, recorded it as ‘I Wanna Go Home’, arguably the most sensitive performance of his career. His daughter, Corrina, was born in 1958 and by way of tribute, he recorded the folk-song ‘Corrine, Corrina’ in America. His version of a West Indian carol, ‘Virgin Mary’, with Miki and Griff, was banned by the BBC, ostensibly on grounds of taste. Pye Records would never have permitted him to record Leadbelly's paean to cocaine, ‘Have a Whiff on Me’, but when he changed it to ‘Have a Drink on Me’, the singalong result, released in 1961, became one of his biggest hits. Another folk-song, ‘Wanderin’, was given a new lyric by Donegan and his then guitarist, Jimmy Currie, and it became ‘I'll Never Fall in Love Again’. Donegan's own version had little success but it became a valuable copyright once it had been recorded by Tom Jones. Donegan established a second career as a music publisher and his company, Tyler Music, with ‘It was a Very Good Year’ and ‘Nights in White Satin’ in its catalogue, saw him through later, leaner years.

By 1962 every single release was taking Donegan in a different direction—he sang the mournful ballad ‘The Party's Over’ one month and was whooping it up with Max Miller on ‘The Market Song’ the next. His thirty-fourth and final chart entry, in 1962, was a close harmony version of Leadbelly's ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’ with the Kestrels, and it left the charts just as the Beatles were entering with their first hit, ‘Love Me Do’.

It is unlikely that Donegan could have continued to have had hit records during the British beat boom, but Pye Records took little care in promoting his work. He moved from Pye to Decca Records, but his relationship with this company was just as fraught and in 1970 a fine album was ruined by a ridiculous title, Lonniepops. There was, however, a considerable market for budget-priced compilations such as The Golden Age of Donegan (1971).

In 1972 Donegan had a summer residency in Scarborough with Freddie ‘Parrot Face’ Davies and the Dallas Boys. He met a schoolgirl, Sharon Ruston, and soon they were living together. Their romance was tempered by Donegan's poor health, as he suffered his first heart attack in 1976. As a result, they moved to Lake Tahoe and were married in 1979. In 1978 Adam Faith, the pop star of the early 1960s, re-established Lonnie Donegan's career by producing the all-star Puttin' on the Style album, with Elton John, Albert Lee, Brian May, Leo Sayer, Ringo Starr, and Ronnie Wood among the guest musicians. 

Donegan triumphantly starred in Skiffle: the Roots of British Rock at the Royal Albert Hall in 1998 and he was appointed MBE in the queen's birthday honours in 2002. He celebrated with a tour called This Could be the Last Time featuring his long-standing musicians Pete Oakman (from Joe Brown's Bruvvers), Paul Henry, Jim Rodford, Nick Payn, Alan ‘Sticky’ Wicket, and Chris Hunt. His son Peter was his opening act. After appearing at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham on 30 October 2002, he collapsed from a coronary artery atheroma at the home of his promoter, Mel Roberts, in Market Deeping, Lincolnshire. He died there on 3 November 2002. 

Donegan's obituaries attested his enormous impact on British popular music, The Guardian referring to him as ‘the first British pop superstar and the founding father of British pop music’ , an assessment with which Donegan would have agreed. Cliff Richard described him as a "terrific force".

See Lonnie sing 'Cumberland Gap'