Skiffle

Skiffle is a genre of folk music with influences from blues, jazz, and American folk music, generally performed with a mixture of manufactured and homemade or improvised instruments. Originating as a form in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, it became extremely popular in the UK in the 1950s, where it was played by such artists as Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers Skiffle Group, Ken Colyer, and Chas McDevitt. Skiffle was a major part of the early careers of some musicians who later became prominent jazz, pop, blues, folk, and rock performers, The Beatles and Rory Gallagher amongst them. It has been seen as a critical stepping stone to the second British folk revival, the British blues boom, and British Invasion of the US popular music scene.
== Links to Peel ==
thumb|330x330px
Skiffle was a relatively obscure genre, and it might have been largely forgotten if not for its revival in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and the success of its main proponent, Lonnie Donegan, who Peel was a fan of. As he pointed out in Margrave Of The Marshes, it also introduced him to blues, which became one of his lifelong musical interests. With its home-made, do-it-yourself ethos, skiffle has also been seen as a precursor of punk, as Billy Bragg points out (in the BBC Arts article linked below). 
Peel very much enjoyed skiffle music in his youth and in an 1987 interview with John Walters for Peeling Back The Years mentioned Donegan as the main skiffle musician he liked, but said he did like others as well:
"It was principally Donegan. I mean, I listened to the others. I quite liked some of the Vipers stuff and I bought the EP of the first national skiffle contest winners – again, a collectors item, I don’t doubt, if you can find the collector…"
In the same interview, Peel also described his attempt to form a skiffle band whilst he was doing National Service:
"And after I’d finished basic training and was sent to a place called Trials Establishment Guided Weapons, Royal Artillery, to Ty Croes Camp, Anglesey, and fell in there with a bunch of people who quite liked rock and roll. There was a chap there called XXPeel states in Margrave Of The Marshes (p. 132) that the individual concerned had objected to being mentioned by JP on air and threatened legal action if this happened again., who now teaches – he’d probably now be rather embarrassed if he’s listening to be reminded of this – but anyway, he now teaches guitar I think in Harrow. But he and I formed the basis of what was supposed to be a skiffle group. We never got much beyond practicing in our billet. I think on one occasion we tried to perform during a camp dance at the camp cinema, and I got up on stage rather drunk and started to sing Gene Vincent’s Say Mama, but was dragged off after a line or two of that by real music lovers."
thumb|330x330px
Although the skiffle boom ended in the late 1950's, many British artists in the field, from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Jimmy Page, John Renbourn and Martin Carthy, moved into other areas, from mainstream pop and rock to the blues and folk revivals from which skiffle groups had derived much of their repertoire. (The Wikipedia article on skiffle has a long list of musicians who began in skiffle before becoming famous in other music styles; many of them did sessions for Peel.) During the early 1970s a few bands, like Mungo Jerry and Brett Marvin and the Thunderbolts, made music with a skiffle influence, but mostly the genre was thought of as old hat.
But in the early 80's, acts such as Terry & Gerry created a revival of the genre, which Peel played often on his shows, including sessions. Peel also performed a skiffle jam on TV with amongst others John Walters and Andy Kershaw for the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1985. Later, he included a number of skiffle records, seven by Lonnie Donegan and one each by Ken Colyer's Skiffle Group and The Vipers Skiffle Group, in the Pig's Big 78 slot of his shows between 2000 and 2004, while Donegan's "Lost John" was one of his selections for the Peelenium 1956.
In 2017 Peel favourite and fellow skiffle enthusiast Billy Bragg published a book on the movement, Roots, Radicals and Rockers; How Skiffle Changed The World. 
== External Links ==
* Wikipedia
* BBC Arts
* Skiffle Recordings
== References ==
Category:Genres
Category:Featured Articles