Lonnie Donegan and the Birth of British Rock & Roll, by Patrick Humphries: review
The miserable side of Lonnie Donegan is the lasting impression from a new biography of the King Of Skiffle.
3.5 
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Lonnie Donegan and the Birth of
British Rock & Roll, by Patrick Humphries Photo:
Robson Books
The man who had such a massive pop hit with My Old Man's A Dustman
seems to have had a personality that stank. Negative, prickly, rude, difficult,
mean, moany, suspicious and bitter are just a few of the words used by musicians
and family members in an engrossing new biography to describe Lonnie Donegan.
The list of musicians inspired by his work is prodigious and impressive. Van Morrison, George Harrison, Mark Knopfler, Paul McCartney, Bill Wyman, Brian May and Richard Thompson pay fulsome tribute in Lonnie Donegan and the Birth of British Rock & Roll, and Patrick Humphries's extensive and well-researched book is ultimately sympathetic to its subject.
But musicians who worked with Donegan tell of a dismally mean-spirited man.
Jazz singer George Melly said that even before Donegan
had his hits with Leadbelly's Rock Island Line, and Dustman,
Donegan was "incredibly big-headed, conceited, arrogant and patronising".
Humphries, who has written musical biographies before of Tom Waits, Bruce
Springsteen and Paul Simon, spoke to a lot of musicians and writers for the book
and pieces together well the tale of how the working class lad from Glasgow
became the world famous 'King Of Skiffle'.
He was born Anthony James Donegan in 1931 and his father was a good enough
violinist to have played with the Scottish National Orchestra. The family moved
to East Ham when Donegan was two and his father gave up music. The son's first
break was playing jazz banjo with Ken Colyer's band, and early chapters evoke
the atmosphere of 1950s London, with lost names such as Doug Dobell (and his
record shop) and a world where actor Derek Guyler still played the washboard.
It was while playing in a band with Chris Barber that Donegan (renamed after his hero Lonnie Johnson) hit the headlines. In 1954, the band added a couple of his 'folk' songs to an album called New Orleans Joys. The tracks were Rock Island Line (which Melly had previously recorded) and John Henry. Donegan recalled: "Decca weren't at all keen. They thought folk music meant Cornish pasties and maypoles, with fa-la-la and a tooralay!"
The band played safe and took a standard session fee (£75 shared) rather than a royalty on every copy sold. Rock Island Line was played by Eamonn Andrews on his Pied Piper radio show and interest snowballed. It ended up selling 350,000 copies in the UK (double that in America) and Donegan was soon sent on a tour of the United States, playing with Harry Belafonte and sharing a TV spot with a bemused Ronald Reagan, who asked: "What is a Lonnie Donegan?
Humphries writes: "Over the years, Donegan moaned relentlessly about his lack of financial reward for cutting Rock Island Line." He usually did not mention that he re-cut the song, nor that he did his own ruthless royalty deals for songs such as Nights In White Satin, nor the number of blues songs he recorded under the self-rewarding tag: "Trad, arranged Donegan."
Donegan - with the washboard act, strong guitar playing and fine catchy songs such as Grand Coulee Dam, Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Overnight?), written by Billy Rose in the 1920s - really became the King Of Skiffle with his 1960 hit My Old Man's a Dustman, which sold more than a quarter of million copies in its first week alone.
He was unamused at being lampooned by Peter Sellers, who did a sketch as a greedy self-serving skiffle singer called 'Lenny Goonigan' ("Do you travel far to collect these songs? Oh yeah man, every Saturday I go down to Dobell's jazz record shop'").
Donegan was riding high but there is a pathos to the account of his decline. Teenage groupies were abundant and two marriages fell apart in short time. Maureen was swapped for Jill, with whom, according to Donegan "things didn't go well on our wedding night" and he described his second marriage as "a horror story".
He met his third wife Sharon - when she was 14 - after she went along to a concert in Scarborough. They married in 1977 when she was 19 and he 47. They had three sons (he had eight children in all) and with Sharon, "Donegan came to regret his rudeness", says the author.
What pained him more than paying alimony was the demise of his career. "The Beatles arrived on the scene and out I went. I was bitter. I spat, fought and cursed," he later admitted. He railed against the success of The Rolling Stones and ended up playing tacky gigs at the Penthouse Club. His daughter Corrina says: "He was always moaning."
His health deteriorated further in the early 1990s - a third heart attack led to major open-heart surgery - but later that decade his musical reputation was revived, thanks in part to Van Morrison. They became friends - "both shared a bitter belief that they had been ripped off", says Humphries - and toured and recorded together. Morrison presented him with an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, calling him "a man we're all in debt to. He started the ball rolling."
Chris Barber saw similarities. "Lonnie was difficult though, because like Van Morrison he's inarticulate at explaining things to people."
Sadly, they fell out after Morrison said to him, it is claimed in the book, "You're a good singer Donegan, but you're not a star," Donegan, who died in 2002, did not speak to him again.
Patrick Humphries: Lonnie Donegan and
the Birth of British Rock & Roll (The Robson Press, £25)
It was while playing in a band with Chris Barber that Donegan (renamed after his hero Lonnie Johnson) hit the headlines. In 1954, the band added a couple of his 'folk' songs to an album called New Orleans Joys. The tracks were Rock Island Line (which Melly had previously recorded) and John Henry. Donegan recalled: "Decca weren't at all keen. They thought folk music meant Cornish pasties and maypoles, with fa-la-la and a tooralay!"
The band played safe and took a standard session fee (£75 shared) rather than a royalty on every copy sold. Rock Island Line was played by Eamonn Andrews on his Pied Piper radio show and interest snowballed. It ended up selling 350,000 copies in the UK (double that in America) and Donegan was soon sent on a tour of the United States, playing with Harry Belafonte and sharing a TV spot with a bemused Ronald Reagan, who asked: "What is a Lonnie Donegan?
Humphries writes: "Over the years, Donegan moaned relentlessly about his lack of financial reward for cutting Rock Island Line." He usually did not mention that he re-cut the song, nor that he did his own ruthless royalty deals for songs such as Nights In White Satin, nor the number of blues songs he recorded under the self-rewarding tag: "Trad, arranged Donegan."
Donegan - with the washboard act, strong guitar playing and fine catchy songs such as Grand Coulee Dam, Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Overnight?), written by Billy Rose in the 1920s - really became the King Of Skiffle with his 1960 hit My Old Man's a Dustman, which sold more than a quarter of million copies in its first week alone.
He was unamused at being lampooned by Peter Sellers, who did a sketch as a greedy self-serving skiffle singer called 'Lenny Goonigan' ("Do you travel far to collect these songs? Oh yeah man, every Saturday I go down to Dobell's jazz record shop'").
Donegan was riding high but there is a pathos to the account of his decline. Teenage groupies were abundant and two marriages fell apart in short time. Maureen was swapped for Jill, with whom, according to Donegan "things didn't go well on our wedding night" and he described his second marriage as "a horror story".
He met his third wife Sharon - when she was 14 - after she went along to a concert in Scarborough. They married in 1977 when she was 19 and he 47. They had three sons (he had eight children in all) and with Sharon, "Donegan came to regret his rudeness", says the author.
What pained him more than paying alimony was the demise of his career. "The Beatles arrived on the scene and out I went. I was bitter. I spat, fought and cursed," he later admitted. He railed against the success of The Rolling Stones and ended up playing tacky gigs at the Penthouse Club. His daughter Corrina says: "He was always moaning."
His health deteriorated further in the early 1990s - a third heart attack led to major open-heart surgery - but later that decade his musical reputation was revived, thanks in part to Van Morrison. They became friends - "both shared a bitter belief that they had been ripped off", says Humphries - and toured and recorded together. Morrison presented him with an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, calling him "a man we're all in debt to. He started the ball rolling."
Chris Barber saw similarities. "Lonnie was difficult though, because like Van Morrison he's inarticulate at explaining things to people."
Sadly, they fell out after Morrison said to him, it is claimed in the book, "You're a good singer Donegan, but you're not a star," Donegan, who died in 2002, did not speak to him again.
Patrick Humphries: Lonnie Donegan and
the Birth of British Rock & Roll (The Robson Press, £25)
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