As Good as It Gets (label)
28 January 2007 (released)
01 February 2007
Lonnie Donegan ' The Original skiffle recordings
Various artists - Great British Skiffle
Various artists ' Great British Rock 'n’ Roll
Various artists ' Great Rockabilly
4 double CDs is a lot of music and the marathon session that was required to do justice to these releases looked like being hard work; until I began to listen to the opening bars of 'Don’t you rock me Daddy-O’ with Lonnie Donegan’s cheeky voice over banjo and washboard. Suddenly this wasn’t hard work at all.
This is probably the first time that all of Donegan’s early skiffle has been collected and you begin to realise how important skiffle was as a bridge between the po-faced jazz of Chris Barber and the 'true to the original’ blues of Alexis Korner and the origins of British rock & roll. It is also bloody good fun.
Donegan crops up again ' a few times ' on 'Great British Skiffle’ but we also get the delights of The City Ramblers Skiffle Group featuring Rambl9ing Jack Elliot or The Vipers Skiffle Group or Alan Lomax & The Ramblers or even Lazy Ade’s Late Hour Boys. Not to mention such names a Ken Colyer & Chris Barber crossing over from the Trad-Jazz world. Proving that skiffle wasn’t just Lonnie Donegan and with a lot of the numbers coming awfully close to blues or jazz this is a fascinating view of the scene as a whole.
Quite a fair number or erstwhile Skifflers turn up on the third of these sets and it can be quibbled as to what Winifred Atwell and Alma Cogan are doing on a rock & roll record but there is plenty of Deep River Boys, Tony Crombie and His Rockets and Britain’s first, genuine, Rocker; Tommy Steele.
The fourth album covers American music in the main but hearing such as Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, George jones or Gene Vincent in the days before they moved to the dark side is an education.
Each of these four sets is worth getting as a musical history of a period of enormous change both musically and sociologically but they are also well presented with good booklets included and as a whole they could just leave a permanent smile of your face.
