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Musician Lonnie Donegan Dies at 71
Nov 5 2002
LONDON -- Lonnie Donegan, a musician whose ``skiffle'' sound inspired John Lennon and Pete Townshend to learn to
play guitar, has died, his publicist said Monday.
Donegan died Sunday in Peterborough, central England, while on a tour of Britain, publicist Judy Totton said. He
was 71 and had suffered several heart attacks.
Donegan's hits included ``Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor (on the Bedpost Overnight),'' "My Old Man's
A
Dustman,'' and ``Rock Island Line,'' but he may have been
more important to British music for inspiring young talents to
imitate and then eclipse his success.
He had planned to play later this month in a concert tribute to former Beatle George Harrison at the Royal Albert
Hall.
Donegan was born Anthony Donegan in Glasgow in 1931. A fan of American country, folk, and blues music, he changed
his name as a tribute to bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
Skiffle music, which Donegan introduced to Britain in the 1950s, was a mixture of styles that traced its roots
to 1920s
America, blending jug band, acoustic, folk, blues, and country and western styles.
The son of a symphony violinist, Donegan absorbed a wide range of popular music from across the Atlantic, including
the Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Josh White, Bessie Smith and Leadbelly. A stint in the British
Army took him to Vienna, where he was influenced by music on the American Forces Radio Network.
He formed the Tony Donegan Jazz Band in 1952, and later joined Chris Barber in the Ken Colyer Jazzmen, which
became a popular club band. Donegan, playing guitar or banjo, performed American blues, country and folk songs
in the breaks between sets.
Colyer quit in 1954 and the renamed Chris Barber Jazz Band made a recording for Decca Records of a few of Donegan's
skiffle tunes, including ``Rock Island Line.''
The album was a hit but the single release of ``Rock Island Line'' was a phenomenon, spending 22 weeks on the British
chart and breaking into the top 20 in the United States. The single was credited to ``The Lonnie Donegan Skiffle
Group,'' and he was a star.
Skiffle was simple and cheap, apparently within the ability of anyone, regardless of musical talent. All that was
needed
was a guitar, a snare drum, jugs, a washboard or a standup
bass made from a broom handle attached to an empty tea chest-and two chords.
``Rock Island Line'' inspired two young Liverpudlians, John Lennon and George Harrison, to take up the guitar.
A year
later, Lennon's skiffle group, The Quarrymen, was playing at a church fete near Liverpool when 15-year-old Paul
McCartney introduced himself.
Pete Townshend, The Who's windmilling guitar player,
started out as leader of The Detours, a skiffle group also featuring Who vocalist Roger Daltrey.
Elton John, Ringo Starr and Queen's Brian May also paid tribute by playing on Donegan's 1978 album ``Puttin' on
the
Style.''
Donegan continued to appear with Van Morrison, who
started his career in a Belfast skiffle band called The Sputniks, and they teamed up for a 1999 recording, ``Skiffle
Sessions.''
Donegan was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, one of Britain's highest honors, in 2000.
He is survived by his third wife, Sharon, four sons and three daughters. Totton said a private family funeral would
be held, followed by a public memorial service. No dates have been
set.
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Anthony James "Lonnie" Donegan, best known in the United States for his 1961 novelty hit "Does Your
Chewing Gum Loose Its' Flavor (On The Bedpost Over Night)?" has died at the age of 71.
The death of the legendary king of skiffle comes after he collapsed midway through a UK tour, ironically labeled
"The Lonnie Donegan 'This Could Be The Last Time' UK Tour".
The star, whose hits included Rock Island Line, Lost John, Cumberland Gap and My Old Man's A Dustman, was with
his wife and son when he died in Peterborough.
Donegan, who had suffered a series of heart attacks, had
been complaining of back trouble shortly before falling ill.
He had been a big influence on the Beatles and had been due
to take part in a tribute concert to George Harrison at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of the month.
John Lennon was playing in a skiffle band inspired by Donegan,
The Quarrymen, when he first met Paul McCartney.
A spokeswoman said: "Lonnie Donegan was a legend - he
changed the face of British popular music.
"In a career that covered over 50 years, he inspired nearly
every major musician alive today."
Fans included Mark Knopfler, Brian May and Van Morrison.
His last performance was in Nottingham, which was the first
city he played as he hit the big time in 1957.
The link below is the web site for Donegan and his final tour.
http://www.scorpio42.freeserve.co.uk/
To look at Lonnie Donegan today, in pictures taken 40 years ago when he was topping the
British charts and hitting the top Ten in America, dressed in a suit, his hair cut short and strumming an
acoustic guitar, he looks like a musical non-entity. But in 1954, before anyone (especially anybody in England)
knew what rock 'n roll was, Donegan was cool, and his music was hot. He's relatively
little remembered outside of England, but Donegan shares an important professional attribute with Elvis Presley,
Bill Haley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Sex Pistols -- he invented a style of music, skiffle, that
completely altered the pop culture landscape and the youth around him, and for a time completely ruled popular
music through that new form. What's more, his music, like that of Presley and Haley, was vital to the early musical
careers and future histories of the Beatles, the
Stones, and hundreds of other groups. And he did it in 1954, before Elvis was known anywhere outside of Memphis
and before Bill Haley was perceived as anything but a western swing novelty
act.
Anthony James Donegan was born in Glasgow, Scotland on April 29, 1931, the son of a classical violinist who had
played with the Scottish National Orchestra. Donegan received no encouragement
to play an instrument or choose music as a profession, for his father, like many talented musicians during the
economic slump of the 1930's, was continually out of work. The family, which moved to East London in 1933, had
no desire to see him go into a dead-end profession. He first became interested in the guitar at age nine, but it
was to be another five years before he took matters into his own hands and bought his first guitar for £12.50
(about $70 American in those days).
Donegan mostly listened to swing and vocal acts such as Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, the Ink Spots, and the Andrews
Sisters during the early 1940's, although he also heard some Indian music
on the BBC, and African songs as transliterated for movies. His taste in jazz went toward Louis Armstrong and Gene
Krupa. It was country-and-western and blues records, especially those by
Frank Crumit and Josh White, that really attracted Donegan's interests. It was through BBC broadcasts around 1946
that Donegan first started learning to play songs like "Frankie and Johnny," "Putting On the Style,"
and "House of the Rising Sun." Before long he was working backwards from Josh White to Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Bessie Smith, and Leadbelly, among others, and by the end of the 1940's, Donegan was as literate in American blues
as anyone born in England. He began playing guitar around London, and going to the small jazz clubs springing up
around the city.
He was coaxed into his first band one night when someone approached him on the train, saying that they'd heard
he was a good banjo player, and invited him to audition for a new group. The man extending the invitation was Chris
Barber, himself a young aspiring jazzman. Donegan had never even held a banjo before but agreed to come to the
audition, then bought a banjo and tried to fake his way through the try-out. His bluff didn't work but the mix
of personalities did, and he was in Barber's first band. The only way Donegan had of mastering his instrument was
by listening to old records and painstakingly working out the music and a technique,
In 1949, he was drafted into the British Army. This interrupted his stay in Barber's band but proved a godsend
when he was stationed in Vienna for a year, which put him in direct contact with
American troops and, even more important, the American Forces Radio Network, which broadcast lots of American music.
He also gained access to more American records than ever before, courtesy of the U.S. soldiers serving in the city.
After his release from the army in 1951, he found a new source of blues and folk music in London, in the library
at the American Embassy, which allowed visitors to listen to any recordings that were on hand. Donegan heard it
all, even--by his own admission--stole a couple, and absorbed every note.
He formed his own group, the Tony Donegan Jazz Band, in 1952. They were successful enough that the National Jazz
Federation asked the band to play a show at Festival Hall with American
ragtime pianist Ralph Sutton and blues/jazz legend Lonnie Johnson. The Federation had brought to the two over to
England in defiance of a Musicians' Union ban on all foreign performers and needed a non-union band like Donegan's
to play support for the two guests. The master of ceremonies at the show made a mistake in his announcement, introducing
the American guitarist as "Tony Johnson" and the British banjo man as "Lonnie Donegan." The
name stuck.
Donegan and his band eventually hooked back up with his old friend Chris Barber, who'd kept his band going throughout
the previous two years, and eventually Barber and Donegan linked up with fellow jazzman Ken Colyer, into a kind
of supergroup led by Colyer. The Ken Colyer Jazzmen, as they were called, specialized in Dixieland jazz, and built
a formidible reputation, their shows popular in every club they played. It was during these shows, between sets
by the full band, that Donegan would come on stage with two other players and perform his own version of American
blues, country, and folk standards, punched up with his own rhythms and accents, on acoustic guitar or
banjo, backed by upright bass and drums. The name "skiffle" was hung on this music as a way of referring
to it on the group's posters. The word, according to Donegan, was suggested by Ken
Colyer's brother Bill, who remembered an outfit called the Dan Burley Skiffle Group, based in Chicago in the 1930's.
It seemed to fit, and it caught on; the Ken Colyer Jazzmen became almost as
popular for Donegan's between-set skiffle songs as they were for their Dixieland music.
Colyer quit the group early in 1954, and Barber took over the leadership. The Chris Barber Jazz Band, as they became
known, were popular enough to justify the recording of an album for Britain's Decca Records label. The album, New
Orleans Joys, featured songs representative of the group's live set, including a selection from Donegan's skiffle
repertory--the skiffle group, consisting of Donegan, Barber on bass, and their friend Beryl Bryden playing rhythm
on washboard, recorded its vocal numbers only after arguing vociferously with the Decca producer, who wanted an
instrumental number. The three layed down four or five songs while the producer was away, and one of the songs
chosen from among those five for the album was "Rock Island Line."
The album sold 60,000 copies in its first month of release, a huge number in England at that time for a debut album
by a home grown jazz group. The Chris Barber Jazz Band had not played before
60,000 people in their whole history, and a phenomenon was obviously afoot. Encouraged by the initial sales of
New Orleans Joy, the company decided to push its luck by lifting individual songs off the album as singles. Each
of those was a success, and eventually "Rock Island Line" came up as a 45 r.p.m. release.
The single had a 22 week run on the English charts, peaking at No. 8. As "Rock Island Line" took the
country by storm, Decca suddenly had one of the bigger--and most wholly unexpected--hits in its history up to that
time. Before the smoke cleared, "Rock Island Line" also managed to reach the top 20 in America, a major
feat for a British artist at that time. In six months, "Rock Island Line" sold three million copies,
50 times the initial sales of the album it came from, an extraordinary figure in anyone's accounting. It was exceptionally
popular among England's teenagers, who accounted for most of its sales. They found the record's rhythm to be infectious
and its sound alluring in a way that no record by anyone from England ever had before. It was catchy, earthy, even
bluesy (after a fashion) American music played in a way that the British kids could master without an enormous
amount of trouble--a guitar or two, and maybe a banjo, an upright bass (or even one made from a washtub or tea
chest, a broom handle, and a piece of rope), and a washboard-and-thimble for percussion.
Donegan was only paid a few pounds for the recording, and received no royalties. He got something more valuable
from it than money, however, for "Rock Island Line" was credited to "The Lonnie Donegan Skiffle
Group." Donegan was suddenly a star, with a public that wanted more music from him. His next single for Decca,
"Diggin' My Potatoes," cut at an October 30, 1954, concert at London's Royal Festival Hall, was banned
by the BBC for its suggestive lyrics--this hurt sales but also gave Donegan a slight veneer of daring and rebeliousness
that didn't hurt his credibility with the kids. Decca gave up on Donegan soon after, believing that skiffle was
a flash-in-the-pan fad. The next month he was at Abbey Road Studios in London cutting a song for EMI's Columbia
label. He'd left the Barber band by then--though Barber continued to play on his records into the middle of the
following year--enticed into a solo career by offers of huge amounts of money to embark on a solo performing career.
By the spring of 1955, he was signed to Pye Records, and his single "Lost John" hit No. 2 in England,
although it never hit in America.
He was successful enough, however, to be brought over to America to appear on the Perry Como Show, followed by
an appearance on the Paul Winchell Show. Suddenly, his manager was getting offers of $1500 a week for concert appearances
in cities from Cleveland to New York--that in a day when $800 was a year's wages in England to people of Donegan's
generation. Donegan proved to be a popular performer in America, playing on bills with Chuck Berry, among others.
He might've continued touring the United States but for the fact he got lonely (his wife and newborn child were
brought over), and that "Lost John" had reached No. 2 in England. After his return, he formed a band
of his own, which initially consisted of jazz guitarist Denny Wright, Micky Ashman on bass, and Nick Nichols on
drums. Wright, a jazz player devoted to Django Reinhardt, proved to be one of the best blues axmen in England at
the time, while Ashman and Nichols made up an exceptionally tight rhythm section. Donegan cut his first album,
Showcase, in the summer of 1956, featuring songs by bluesmen Leadbelly and Leroy Carr, not to mention moody traditional
blues like "I'm a Ramblin' Man" and A. P. Carter's "Wabash Cannonball." The record was a hit,
racking up sales in the hundreds of thousands.
In concert, the group's sound was fuller still, with Donegan and Wright sharing guitar chores with bearded, bespectacled
Dick Bishop, who had played on Donegan's earliest records. Still later,
Jimmy Currie, a veteran of Tony Crombie's Rockets (the first home-grown rock 'n roll band in England, patterned
loosely after Bill Haley's Comets) became Donegan's lead guitarist in what is
regarded as his strongest band. Currie was not only more folk oriented than Wright, but also wrote songs, but Wright
would turn up on Donegan sessions as late as 1965. Donegan and his band
essentially played live in the studio (there was virtually no overdubbing in those days), but the best record of
their sound comes from a concert recorded at London's Conway Hall on January 25, 1957, which was later released
by Pye. Another compelling glimpse of the group can be found in the British juke-box movie The Six-Five Special
(1957), based on the popular television series of the period, in which Donegan rips through a killer live rendition
of "Jack 'O Diamonds," as well as a
fine cover of Woody Guthrie's "The Grand Coulee Dam."
While Donegan was racking up hits--"Bring A Little Water, Sylvie" (#7), "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O"
(#4), "Cumberland Gap (#6), and "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the
Bedpost Overnight?" (#3, and #5 in the U.S.) all in less than three years--thousands of skiffle groups were
springing up all over England. New artists, most notably Tommy Steele and, later, Cliff
Richard, started out playing skiffle music and put their own stamp on the material before moving on to other sounds.
Among the many tens of thousands of British teens he inspired were members of the Beatles, Gerry & The Pacemakers,
and the Searchers. By mid-1958, however, skiffle was waning rapidly as a commercial sound, but Donegan continued
to appear on the charts right into
1962. Only when the next wave of young rockers came along, who like Donegan had their own ideas about music and
what they wanted to do with it, did he finally fade from the charts.
He continued to record sporadically during the 1960's, including some sessions at Hickory Records in Nashville
with Charlie McCoy, Floyd Cramer, and the Jordanaires, but after 1964, he was primarily occupied as a producer
for most of the decade at Pye Records. Among those he worked with during this period was future Moody Blues guitarist-singer
Justin Hayward. Donegan's attempt at a recording comeback late in the 1960's was unsuccessful, but in 1974, a new
boomlet for skiffle music in Germany brought him on tour and into the studio anew, and the following year he and
Chris Barber toured together and recorded a new long-player, The Great Re-Union Album. In 1976, however, after
another series of shows and recordings in Germany, Donegan suffered a heart attack that left him sidelined, and
he moved to California to recuperate.
In 1978, however, he was back in the studio, recording the album that was his first chart entry in 15 years, Putting
On the Style, an all-star skiffle-style album that teamed Donegan with Ringo Starr,
Elton John, Brian May, Peter Banks, and other stars and superstars of rock who owed their entry into music to "Rock
Island Line." A follow-up album featuring Albert Lee presented Donegan working in a somewhat less familiar
country-and-western vein. By 1980, he was making regular concert appearances again, and a new album with Barber
followed. In 1983 Donegan toured
England with Billy Joe Spears, and in 1984, he made his theatrical debut in a revival of the 1920 musical Mr. Cinders.
More concert tours followed, along with a move from Florida to Spain. His
heart surgery in 1992 slowed Donegan down again, but by the end of the year he was touring once again with Chris
Barber.
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