Skiffle

Joe Brown is an interesting one.

What you're kind of seeing here is the end of Skiffle.

You talk about the importance of Skiffle in the book.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Skiffle kind of kicks off in early 56, really.

So it had a three-year run of being significant.

The main reason Skiffle died is because no one wrote any songs, which is weird, but they didn't.

Everything was a cover version.

That was a very, you know, standard song from the American folk revival.

And, um, uh, heard, um, a recording of Lonnie Donegan doing it, the Scottish, uh, Skiffle singer kind of recently, you know, anyway, I wound up playing with it some and, um, but that's a song I've known for years.

It wasn't like I just recently discovered it.

Others will be like, um, some version of a thing that I know that I never heard before.

Yeah.

When like the Beatles were doing like Skiffle and, you know, like those really close harmonies and really influenced by like classic rock and roll music and English folk music.

And then they became something else when they started doing drugs or whatever, you know, I mean, the Beach Boys has the same thing.

I mean, there's like, you know, this surf rock pop with like lots of like songs about girls and everything.

When I got him in the car, I was aware of this stuff about dementia and music.

And I knew that Malky loved Skiffle and he loved Lonnie Donegan, right? And I thought, right.

And I pulled the car over in the M77.

I was taking him down a run round like Killane Castle and all that.

For Jimmy Page, it was the music of Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, and McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters.

Those were his biggest influences, along with Lonnie Donegan, Skiffle, and Elvis, the King.

Plant, too, greatly admired Robert Johnson and Elvis as well as Buka White and Skip James, among many others.

John Paul Jones loved blues singer and guitarist Big Bill Brunzi and the jazz of Charles Mingus with Chicago jazz musician Phil Upchurch that inspired his decision to even become a bassist.

Whereas me, my mentor really was more like Lex's Corner, who started the first blues clubs in town, R&B clubs.

And he was involved with the first Skiffle, Ken Collier in the early 50s.

And he was really broad-minded.

And he didn't live long.

Donegan.

I always tell people that Rock Island Lion was the record that started Skiffle.

And My Old Man's a Dustman was a record that killed a desert.

Yes.