About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Lonnie Donegan

Encyclopedia : L : LO : LON : Lonnie Donegan

Lonnie Donegan
Enlarge
Lonnie Donegan

Lonnie Donegan MBE (April 29, 1931 – November 3, 2002) was a skiffle musician, possibly the most famous of them all, with more than 20 UK Top 30 hits to his name. He is sometimes called the King of Skiffle and is often cited as a large influence on the generation of British musicians who became famous in the 1960s.

Contents

Early life and trad jazz

He was born Anthony James Donegan in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a professional violinist. His ethnic mix was Scottish/Irish. He moved with his mother to London at an early age, after his parents divorced. Inspired by blues music and New Orleans jazz bands he heard on the radio, he resolved to learn the guitar, and bought his first at the age of fourteen.

The first band he played in was the trad jazz band led by Chris Barber, who approached him on a train asking him if he wanted to audition for his group. Barber had heard that Donegan was a good banjo player; in fact, Donegan had never played the banjo at this point, but he bought one and managed to bluff his way through the audition. His stint in this group was interrupted, however, when he was called up for National Service in 1949. He also played in Ken Colyer's group

In 1952, he formed his first group, the Tony Donegan Jazzband, which found some work around London. On one occasion they opened for the blues musician Lonnie Johnson at the Royal Festival Hall. Donegan was a big fan of Johnson, and took his first name as a tribute to him. The story goes that the host at the concert got the musicians' names confused, calling them "Tony Johnson" and "Lonnie Donegan", and Donegan was happy to keep the name.

Skiffle

Donegan was the first person to become famous playing skiffle in the United Kingdom, and went on to have an influential hit in Britain and the U.S.A.. At the time he sang and played both guitar and banjo for Chris Barber's Jazz Band, and began providing what he called a "skiffle" break during the intervals. With a washboard, a tea-chest bass and a cheap Spanish guitar, he had a lot of fun entertaining the audiences with folk songs and blues by artists such as Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, casually giving the impression that anyone could do it. This proved so popular that in 1955 he recorded a fast-tempoed version of Leadbelly's "Rock Island Line", with Chris Barber's Jazz Band, featuring a washboard but not a tea-chest bass, with John Henry on the B-side. It was an enormous hit in 1956, but ironically, because it was a band recording, Lonnie made no money from it beyond his original session fee. It was the first debut record to go gold in Britain, and reached the top ten in the United States, and Donegan has suggested that it might have influenced the beginnings of white rock and roll. The skiffle style encouraged amateurs to get started, and one of the many skiffle groups that followed was The Quarry Men formed in March 1957 by John Lennon.

After splitting from Barber, he went on to make a series of popular records, with successes including "Cumberland Gap" and "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It's [sic] Flavour on the Bedpost Over Night?". He turned to a music hall style with "My Old Man's A Dustman" which was not well received by skiffle fans, but reached number one in the UK singles charts.

Donegan was unfashionable and generally ignored through the late 1960s and 1970s (although he wrote "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" for Tom Jones in 1969), and he began to play on the American cabaret circuit. In 1976, he suffered his first heart attack while in the United States and underwent quadruple bypass surgery. He returned to the public's attention in 1978, when he made a record of his early songs with such figures as Ringo Starr, Elton John and Brian May called Putting on the Style. In 1992 Donnegan underwent further bypass surgery following another heart attack. He experienced another late renaissance when in 2000 he released The Skiffle Sessions – Live In Belfast, a critically acclaimed album made with Van Morrison. He also played at the Glastonbury Festival, and was appointed MBE in 2000.

Donegan's influence on the generation of musicians that followed him is unquestioned. He inspired both John Lennon and Pete Townsend to learn to play the guitar, and was responsible for hundreds of other skiffle groups being formed. One of them, The Quarrymen, later evolved into The Beatles.

He died after a final heart attack in Peterborough, mid-way through a UK tour and shortly before he was due to perform at a memorial concert for George Harrison. He had suffered several heart attacks in the years leading up to his death at age 71.

Quotations

Discography

Trivia

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: