Muddy Waters At Newport 1960

>> from the library ofcongress in washington, d.c. >> stephen winick: hello. my name is stephen winickand we're here at the library of congress where we willbe interviewing billy bragg. i should also introducemy co-interviewer. this is mary sue twohyof siriusxm radio. >> mary sue twohy: thank you. >> stephen winick:so, billy you're here because you have written a bookabout skiffle and so we're going

to talk a bit aboutfolk music and skiffle and their interrelations. so, i'm going to startout by, by mentioning that i'm pretty sure that back in the 80s i saw you performsome traditional songs in your sets way back then. so, when did you first becomeaware of traditional song and did you alwaysincorporate them into your gigs a little bit?

>> billy bragg: well,i became aware of a traditionalsong [inaudible]. i was really into simon andgarfunkel when i was like 12 or 13 and they kindof introduced me to "scarborough fair" whichis an english folksong; two guys from brooklyn. >> stephen winick: right. >> billy bragg: we're going toget a lot of that stuff i think, um and that kind of ledme to sort of dealing

with other americansinger-songwriters, but i was always aware thatthey had drawn some inspiration from british folk music. in 1973 or 4, our locallibrary had a record section and it was predominantlyclassical music, but they had a lot of albumsamplers from the topic label. topic it was just agreat british folk label from the 1930s. it was originally thecommunist party record label.

it was a worker's record label and what they did wasthey anthologized folks from a surrounded theme, sothey would have war, work, the sea you know, and i sort ofavidly listened to these songs and so that introducedme to people like shirley and dolly collins, thewatersons, bert lloyd and so i kind of then had asort of knowledge of folk music, but when punk happenedin 1977 being year zero. >> billy bragg: all thatkind of went out the window

until in 1984 when thecoalminers were on strike for a year, because i was a sortof performer, i was able to go into the coal fieldsand do gigs. on the very first showsthat i did up in sunderland, there was an old guy namedjock purdon an old miner, retired miner who soundstage,who was opening for me, soundstages hand cupped overhis ear and his songs were so much more radical than mine and i felt a bit embarrassedreally, because i'm supposed,

you know, i'm the littlepunk rocker and everything, you know, come up here. and i felt really embarrassedabout it and he was so kind to me, because what he saidexplicitly to me was that, you know, whatevermy relationship to this material now that i'vedone a gig for the miners, i was part of this tradition andthat's the way it's always been. i mean, you know, sincethen i've always thought of myself i'm not of thetradition clearly, but i am part

of it and i, i kind of went backto those records that i knew and those songs i remembered andstarted to bring that influence into my own songwriting. the first example of thatwould be "between the wars", and that kind of became thedefining, the song got me in the charts righton top of the pops, so it was the miner's strikereally that reconnected me with my own traditional music. >> stephen winick: yeah.

that's great. although, i should saymany people noticed that the beginning of "a new england" soundssuspiciously like paul simon. >> billy bragg: well, i mayhave borrowed those two lines, but in my defense, istarted writing that song when i was 21 years oldand then i came back to it when i was 22, so. >> stephen winick:so, it defines.

>> billy bragg: at thetime, it made a lot of sense and also i didn't realizethat kirsty maccoll was going to have a top ten hit withit and make it famous. i just thought it would besome obscure little song that i played at parties,so that's my defense, and [inaudible] harmoniestoo, he spoke to me about that and he was pretty cool withit, so i think i got away it. >> stephen winick: great. >> mary sue twohy: so, as youreferenced you're involvement

with punk, how did youactually get started in punk? how did that leap happen? >> billy bragg: well, in thesummer of 1977, i might be, it must have beenearlier than that, it must have been summer1976; the summer of 1976, there was somethinggoing on the uk, yeah, there was a band calleddr. feelgood who were kind of playing sort ofmaximum r and b and had a lead guitar playercalled wilko johnson who looked

like the sort ofkid at my school that would get beatup all the time. you know, he had sortof a weird haircut and he had his top bandana up, but he was cool,somehow he was cool. how is this geeky lookingbloke incredibly cool? and in some way it was likea, it was like a precursor of punk rock, becausewithin 12 months lots of unprepossessing blokes likeelvis costello, and ian dury

and johnny rotten, and joestrummer were suddenly cool. so, there was hopefor all of us. and what happened wasthat summer i was playing in a little band with my matesin our parent's backrooms and we went out and boughtthe first who record, the first stones record, andthe first small faces record and we kind of getting, sortof trying to aim for that sort of sound and then we heardthe jam who were kind of right in that nexus but they were ourage which just blew our minds.

so, we went to see the jam play in a little pub callednashville rooms and in shows the rainbows asort of prime london rock place where we've been to see, we'd seen the small facesthere the year before; the small faces revival, butthey were playing with the clash and we went along to thatgig really extensively to see the jam, but theclash just blew us away because they were,they were our age.

>> mary sue twohy: yeah. >> billy bragg: and they weredoing all the things we liked about the stones, and thesmall faces, and the who, so it kind of a catalyticmoment. we had been to see thestones and the who that year and the stones were i'll justcall, it was this massive array and it was the first properarena show in the uk and the who played at a giantfootball club. it was like, you know, they weremiles away and here was the jam

and the clash not onlyphysically close to us, but close to us culturallyas well and i think that was a catalyst. you know, i went home and gaveaway all of my eagles albums, cut my hair, and bought a pair of plastic trousers[brief laughter]. >> mary sue twohy: that simple. >> billy bragg: yeah, it didn'treally change my songwriting much, but it was

that straightforwardin those days, yeah. >> stephen winick: so, it wasthe miner's strike that got you to do political songsthough specifically? >> billy bragg: no. well, i think i wasdoing political songs. i think punk wasquite political. the political side of punki had always been into. the first political activismi was a part in was this rock against racism andthat was in 78.

so, i was clearly at a kind of what you might callpersonal politics i suppose. what's significant aboutthe miner's strike that got to my songwriting is it turns meinto an ideological songwriter, because at the same time thisminer strike happens in 1984, i come to americafor the first time. now, in the uk people had seenme on my own playing guitar. they call me a one manclash and, you know, in american people comparedme to woody guthrie.

>> billy bragg: woodyguthrie i knew. woody guthrie was, ofcourse, a big [inaudible] fan, but it was very difficultto find woody's records in where i lived anywayin london in the 70s. eventually, to just tohear what he sounded like i eventually managedto track down a cassette on the disk du monde [phonetic];the french disk du monde, well they even spelledhis name wrong. on the cover the spelled hisname with "ie" woodie with an

"ie", and there was nodetails just a track. so, and i can remember playingit and it sounded so primal that i thought i can'tdo this, this is awful. this is before punk. >> billy bragg: so, when icame to the united states of america was; one of the mostamazing things about coming to the united states ofamerica was record shops, because there's so much greatmusic that you don't get in english recordshops and, of course,

there were woody's records. so, i was able to nowbuy woody's records and buy perhaps the greatestof all of his records which is the library ofcongress recordings they did for alan lomax in ithink 1941 i think; that really where woody's justsitting there talking weirdly similar to what we'redoing now stephen. >> billy bragg: it'sjust occurred to me. >> billy bragg: it'sa bit strange.

well, some of, some of that wasdone in this suite of rooms. >> billy bragg: yes. >> stephen winick:although, some of it was done in a different building. >> billy bragg: yeah, yeahi mean that's, that's just. >> mary sue twohy: wow. >> billy bragg: thatjust occurred to me there for a second. so, but yeah that, that thoserecordings really helped me

to understand woody, but alsoi also came across "joe hill." i had never across this,i didn't know anything about joan whatsoever and i think i boughtutah phillips' album, "you have fed us; we have fedyou all for a thousand years." what a great record that is. >> billy bragg: and i think thathas "there is power in a union" on it, and i took that homeand in the midst of the strike, i needed to write a union songand i was familiar with the song

of the americas "rally'round the flag" which ry cooder had recordedfor the "long riders" soundtrack and i sort of borrowedthe tune from that. the chorus of that song is "the union forever,hurrah, boys hurrah." so, i borrowed that tune; iborrowed joe hill's title "power in a union" and i wrote anew set of lyrics for that, so and was elated, i was veryhappy to find subsequently that the tune for "rally'round the flag" was stolen

from an english hymn. so once again, what goesaround comes around. >> mary sue twohy: exactly. >> stephen winick:yeah, yeah, yeah. >> billy bragg: we'regoing to say that a lot in this conversation i feel. i guess another example of thatis that, is that much later in your career you wereapproached by nora guthrie and the guthrie family towrite music to woody's lyrics,

so how did that come about? >> billy bragg: well, thatcame about i was doing a gig in central park for woody's90th birthday with pete seeger and arlo, and the disposableheroes of hyphoprisy." i had had a few run-ins withthe guthrie legend before. one of the most dauntingmoments that i ever faced as a performer was at thevancouver folk festival in 1987 where i had been askedif i would be interested to do a woody guthrieworkshop, you know,

a workshop is a workshop youknow where 3 or 4 artists sit around and are taking turns toplay songs and there's a theme. and i thought, you know,you have to play 3 songs, so i thought i know3 woody songs and hard can that be, you know? i didn't think any moreabout it until the day. and when i got there, the other3 participants were pete seeger, arlo guthrie, andramblin' jack elliott. >> mary sue twohy: uh-oh.

>> billy bragg: yeah, i suddenlythough i am so busted here. if any of these playedthe 3 songs on our office, but jack who sat next tome on top of his guitar, on top of the body of his guitarhe had a bit of papers taped on it with loads of woodytitles which i suppose was like having a memoire for him. so, i was looking at them,"oh yeah, i know that one", you know, because youknow them most distinctly because you've listened to allof those, "oh, yeah, yeah."

so, i kind of got away with it. i got away with it until oldmad seeger stood up at the end like a sort of tallredwood tree and began in his beautiful cleartone began singing "this land is your land"and then he threw it to arlo for the next verse and i thoughtuh-oh and then he threw it to jack, it's getting closerto me and i'm like this is it, so i just had to saylook i'm really sorry that we don't singthis in england,

this land ain't my landclearly and i apologized. and i think nora took pity onme and by inviting me to come and look at the songsin the archives she kind of brought me into the family. it was a really amazingexperience, because not only was norathere with the archivists, with at the time2000 complete lyrics that woody had written as songs. the only reason nobody hadplayed them was because,

like myself, woody didn'twrite musical notation. >> billy bragg: whenhe writes to sing; if i write a song what you getis a piece of paper with words on it, the words they rhyme andthey have a meaning to them, you know, but you, there'sno hint of what the tune is because i've got here. it's easy to me, because ialways record it on my computer. so, you know, but for woodyhe only actually recorded 10% of the songs he wrote.

so, all of these songs werelanguishing in files waiting to be brought back to life,and nora's genius idea was to bring some peoplein to do that. >> billy bragg: but it wasn'tjust nora, because also in the office was, was a woody'sold manager harold leventhal. >> billy bragg: and thething about harold was because he was there, if i founda lyric referring to something that happened in the 30s,i can go in to see harold and he could explain tome what the context was.

>> mary sue twohy: oh. >> billy bragg: you know, ifound a song about hanns eisler who was the guy who wrote theeast german national anthem; that's all i know. and i'm like, why iswoody writing a song about hanns eisler? so, i go in to see harold and he tells me thisincredible story verse, each of the versesthere's another note

of eisler's brotherwas the comintern agent in hollywood in the 1940s. and their sister betrayed them to the house un-americanactivities committee and another character wasdixiecrat senator who was, you know, pushing this kind ofwhat man had really pugrum on, you know, jewish-americanintellectuals. i mean, the whole thingjust came out of harold and this song, it was just anincredible, incredible privilege

to sit and talk to himand all he ever asked me to do was whenever i camehe asked to bring him a copy of the british communistnewspaper the morning star. >> stephen winick: wow. >> billy bragg: now i don'tknow if he was like testing me or anything, but and itwasn't easy to find either. you can't find it everywhereonly particular shops, but i always triedto find a copy of it and he would alwaysask me about, you know,

what's happening withthe communist party, "i'm not that, haroldit's like." it's [inaudible], but he wasan amazing, amazing character. he was the cofounder ofthe newport folk festival and he had a huge, hugehistory and he had been a, he'd been a song-pluggerfor irving berlin. >> billy bragg: there's apicture on the wall behind him of him with like a 19-year-oldfrank sinatra in the 1940s. the skinniest frank sinatrayou have ever seen in this suit

that like was drowning himand so harold was like a, was one of the, he was justa, it was a real privilege to have sat and talked tohim and listen to him talk; amazing guy, amazing guy. >> mary sue twohy: so,you spoke of pete seeger and when we saw you at thefolk alliance international conference in kansas city,you referenced pete seeger. what is your relationshipwith him? >> billy bragg: well, ithink pete is the person

who really first probablyconnected me to woody, you know. >> mary sue twohy: nice. >> billy bragg: he, he,i first encountered him in east germany actually at a political folk songfestival there in 1987. >> billy bragg: a peaceconcert and he was, you know, he was aware of who i was. i'm not sure he knew muchof my material, but again, he was someone else whoalways encouraged me

to write political songs. at another folk festivalin vancouver in 89, just after tiananmensquare had happened, i was in the artist's chow tentand uncle pete came and sat down and said, "listen i want, i'm going to finish my settomorrow night on the mainstage by singing "the internationale"to ireland in respect to the students whohad been singing it in the tiananmen square, and hesaid and bruce cockburn is going

to come sing the canadianversion, someone is going to come sing the mexicanversion, i'd like you to come and sing the britishversion billy." i was like "oh, petegive me a break mate." the lyrics, the lyricsare "arise, ye starvelings from your slumbers/arise youcriminals of want/for reason and revolt now thunders/andhere ends the age of can't." i said, "pete, it doesn'teven rhyme", you know. so, he said "well, maybe youshould just write a new verse."

and in folk music there'ssome people you can't tell to "piss off" and unclepete is one of them. so, before i had even had achance to say [inaudible] pete, rewrite "the internationale"he found a flier, there actually was aflier by a demonstration in [inaudible] square. he got a pencil and he closedhis eyes and he began singing under his breath theoriginal french lyrics; "c'est la lutte finale"and he would write

down verbatim the first verseand chorus, said "there you go. you got 24 hours." like i said, you can'treally say it's like humbug from a professor sulk. i wrote a verse and a chorusand i came back and i sang it and it was all good, andthen the berlin wall had come down the same year and,and all of our sort of leftwing culture wasbeing put in the a skip out in the back, everything.

not just the bad stuffthat guiding it was stuff that was tarnishedwith totalitarianism, but the good stuff waskind of skip as well. so i thought well maybei should write, you know, rewrite "the internationale"and record it. maybe that's what, so i-- i wrote small verses and isent them to pete and i went to see ewan maccoll and peggyand sort of said something "i've written theseversus what do you think?"

and i recorded and put it outon an album in 1990 and now if you get the iww littlered songbook, my version is in there next to the original. >> mary sue twohy: right on. >> billy bragg: isn'tthat incredible? >> stephen winick:that's amazing. >> mary sue twohy: that's great. >> billy bragg: it's uncle pete. that's pete.

you can't say no to pete seeger. >> stephen winick: so, as imentioned one of the reasons that we're interviewingyou is your book on skiffle and you talked before theinterview about how skiffle kind of throws the americanaudience people and this country don'treally know what skiffle is. so, give us a littleintroduction. what is skiffle and what ledyou to become interested in it? >> billy bragg: well, the 140characters answer that question,

is skiffle is basicallyamerican, a british school boys in the 1950s playing leadbelly songs basically. >> stephen winick: alright. >> billy bragg: whatit represents, it represents theintroduction of the guitar into british popculture and it's among when our pop music goes frombeing a jazz-based confection for grownups in which anyonewho's not a grownup is offered novelty songs like "how muchis that doggy in the window?"

it changes from that to being aguitar led music for teenagers, and skiffle, the catalyst for this is a guy named lonniedonegan who has a hit in 1956 with a version of leadbelly's "rock island line." now, donegan is the banjoplayer in a trad jazz band, the chris barber jazz band andhe records "rock island line" for a trad jazz album called"new orleans joy" in july 1954 and skiffle emergesfrom trad jazz because the british tradguys who are interested

in playing new orleans; trad jazz means jazzfrom new orleans. predominantly thatwas made before 1915. what's significant in 1958 iswhen bands started going north and recording, you know, theoriginal dixieland jazz bands and these groups;start recording jazz and the thing startsmoving forward. new orleans jazzhas no soloists. it's a collective effort.

everyone plays around therhythm and around the turn. so someone like louis armstrongplaying solos that's a different topic of jazz as far asthe purists are concerned. and but the british tradjazz fans, they were unable to find anyone to teachthem play this stuff so they only had the records that were made predominantlymade in the 1920s; 20s recordings. and because of theprimitive nature

of the recordingequipment, the musicians had to blow really hard to be heard which is partly the reasonwhy jazz has that pep, they used to call pep to it. you know, it's kind oflike they're blasting out. so, the british guysdidn't have much technique, so they just blew like billygoats on their instruments, and as a result after 30minutes their lips were so numb they couldn'tplay anymore.

so, in order not tolose their audience, they would pick-up acousticguitars, a washboard for rhythm, and use the drum basefrom the jazz band and they would play broadlylead belly's repertoire, and lead belly is significantbecause, steady now, he's the greatest folk singerthat america ever produced both as a writer of songs,an interpret of songs, and a collector of songs. and i was arguable tosay that in his place

and on your show, but. >> stephen winick: wecan go along with that. >> billy bragg: as anoutsider i think, you know, you got to remember as faras woody was concerned, lead belly was to himas woody was to bob. you know, he was physicallya giant, but also i think in american culturehe's a giant as well. he's the folk shakespeare. he's that, you know, thatguy that always wanted to,

because you know woody was agenius too, but woody read, he wrote, he typedyou know, he could, he had a decent educationthan lead belly. lead belly just hadmade himself, he had made himself you knowand you can hear in the music. so, so lead belly's vastrepertoire which includes, i mean, i read somewhereabout lead belly and blind lemon jeffersonplaying a song called "seven drunken nights"which is an old [inaudible]

drinking song. where they got it from i have noidea, but if they were playing that and "rock islandline", you know, that's a pretty broad scope. so, the jazzes decided to playthese lead belly songs partly because they believed that theblues predated traditional jazz, which i don't thinkis actually true. the 12-bar performers as we knowit i think postdates trad jazz, but i think it was becausethe trad jazzes used,

in new orleans usedthe phrase "blues." >> billy bragg: when they madean informal jam and i think that slightly confusedthem, anyway, so they started playing thesewhat they called a breakdown session; breakdown session withthe acoustic guitars and stuff and that became really popular. in some cases in some eventsit became more popular than the trad jazz itself,particularly with teenagers, because teenagers wanted tojive and they couldn't do

that in a ballroom in theuk because ballroom dancing, i don't know if it's true inthe united states of america, but in the uk ballroomdancing is processional. it kind of, the dancers you knowgo in a huge sweeping circle. whereas, jiving is more stag,right, they move back and forth but they don't movearound procession. so, if you got kids jiving and adults ballroomdancing you're going to get, you're going to get atraffic jam, a snarl up.

so, jiving was banned. so, these kids went to thesetrad jazz gigs and they kind of jived and then alongcomes lonnie donegan and he's giving it loads with"rock island line" and it's, it's you know, it's uptempo enough to engage them. so, so it becomereally, really popular. >> mary sue twohy:can you expand on "rock island line" the song? >> billy bragg: yeah,of course, yeah.

the song "rock islandline" begins its life as a glee club song for therock island line railway written by engineers in the biddle shops which is the engineeringworkshops in the suburbs of little rock, arkansas. and they were encouraged by the, they're african-americanworkers, they were encouraged by the company to form a vocalgroup and to go to public events like picnics or tomeetings or church, socials

and sing the praises ofthe "rock island line." and there are quite a fewsongs about rock island. the, there's one that, theoriginal tune to, i'm not going to be able to rememberthe name of it now, the one of the great american; one of the early great americanrailroad songs about the train that takes the hobos to heaven. >> billy bragg: help me out here and i'll think ofit in a minute.

>> billy bragg: it was original, but tune of that wasoriginally "wabash cannonball." >> mary sue twohy: yes. >> billy bragg: "wabashcannonball" was originally the tune that was originally about the great rock islandroute that was [inaudible]. so, you know, it's not aone-off, it's something that was going on from inthe golden age of railway. that's how they promotedthe railways.

but we first comeacross it outside those of us outside arkansaswhen it's recorded by john a. lomax accompaniedby lead belly who is kind of rodeoing for himin cummins prison farm in southern arkansas in 1935. lomax is recording songs for thelibrary of congress, work songs and he believes that peoplewho are in prison are closer to the folk source, becausehe said nobody listened to the radio for the last10 years; he's concerned

about radio may underminethe folk process. so, he's recording these worksongs and an architect led by an inmate named kelly pacecomes before the microphone and they sing "rock island line"as a call and response song. and unfortunately lomax or leadbelly never actually asked him if it's a work song or not,so the question of whether or not it's a work songor just a song they sung, i think it's stilldebatable because i'm not; it's quite a fast song.

what work you could possibly do? you certainly couldn'tchop an axe. lead belly turned itinto a chopping song. he started it off asa chopping song, but. so anyway, john lomax recordsthe song on a piece of equipment on the size of a sort of domestic fridgeand he needs that. that's how he, that'show he records songs. lead belly, i mean, he sungthe song a couple of times

and he's got it,he takes it away. he steals a couple oflines from nursery rhymes; the cat in the cupboard andsome traditional blues lines and he turns it intothe song we know. he kind of adds to it. he bolts stuff onto it andwhen he goes out with lomax to, to give talks toacademics at universities, he's on the east coast,he's in a bit of a quandary with this song because forthose songs that he learned

through the old tradition,he has a context for them. he says, you know, when we sangthis song we did this, you know, this is; i mean, he's thefirst vernacular singer to ever do this kind ofthing in american culture. and so, he's you know, the academics said they hadnever seen a blues singer like this in front of them, sothey want to know the context, but he has no contextfor "rock island line." he's got a great song,but he's got no context.

so, he remembers that theyrecorded by the wood pile, so he starts off talkingabout as a chopping song, but then after a couple of yearsit kind of transforms himself into this story abouta train driver and, or he calls them adepot agent i think, but he's actually willbe a signal man i imagine and he's telling the traindriver that the train's got to holt, because there'san express train coming in; the golden age of railroad,freight trains have to give way

to express trains, butthere's an exemption on animal welfare grounds ifyou're carrying livestock. so, he says to the,lead belly says to the depot agent,"i've got pigs. i've got horses, i'vegot all livestock." he says, "okay, you can go." and then he goes down theline and shouts back to him, "fooled yeah, i've fooled yeah, i've got pig iron"which maybe a pun.

and it's that version whichfinally develops into the story that we're familiar with. and donegan i think uses oneof the later versions recorded in the 1940s as his model, buthe adds to the story again by, by introducing atollgate into the story. the train has got to pay a tollbecause of what it has on it, it's like a tariff really. it's like the idea of a tarifftrying to cross the border, but of course, therenever was a tollgate

on american railroads, you know. so, donegan is kind of adding toit in a way that lead belly did. but the interesting thing aboutdonegan's version is by bringing in the tollgate, he's kind ofwatermarked it as his version. so, if you ever hear aversion of "rock island line" and it's got a tollgate in it, that person is not beenlistening to lead belly, they listened to lonnie donegan. and i have to say,johnny cash's first album

with sun records openswith "rock island line" and he mentions the tollgate, sothat's very interesting for me; that's a very, very interesting;there is a saying with folks, "what goes around comes around." >> billy bragg: i don't know if you ever reallyheard that steve. >> stephen winick: yep. absolutely. >> billy bragg: yeah.

>> stephen winick:yeah, it's interesting because you know johnnywas not necessarily aware that he learned it fromsomeone who had learned it from lonnie donegan ifyou know what i mean. it became so much apart of popular culture. >> billy bragg: well, it was a. >> stephen winick:for that short time. >> billy bragg: itwas a huge hit. i mean.

>> billy bragg: it got up tonumber 8 in the american charts and there were a dozen copies. if i remember rightly, rod mckuen's firstband he recorded it. the guy who became the voice ofthe jolly green giant he did it. there was a kind ofuncle dave macon type of guy he recorded aversion of it as well and they all mentionthe tollgate. they all mention the tollgate.

>> stephen winick: yes. >> billy bragg: it's,i mean you know, i don't if lonnieknew this but he kind of like recast the songfor a new generation. i think he just didn'tunderstand what the situation was that led [multiplespeakers]. >> billy bragg: ithink he was trying to make sense of it, yeah. >> billy bragg: i think he wastrying to make sense of it.

>> billy bragg: in his own mind. >> billy bragg: because theold song says the train goes to new orleans and "rock islandline" it went to new orleans and it's possible that leadbelly might be saying moline. >> billy bragg: andmoline is the county in which rock island is. it's one of the tri-citiesi think davenport, so he might have beentalking about that. nobody.

>> stephen winick: speaking ofwhat goes around comes around, i mean one of the reasonsthat, that we at the library of congress are so interestedin this skiffle story is that lead belly and john lomaxwere making that recording for the library of congress. >> billy bragg: that's right. >> stephen winick: and so,that recording is here. it was made for usand we still have it and you were actuallyable to look at the.

>> billy bragg: the sleeve. >> stephen winick: atthe sleeve from it. >> billy bragg: yeah, thatwas an amazing thing to see. to see john lomax'shandwriting on there. >> billy bragg: and his notesfrom that day was kind of, that was a sort ofa wow moment for me. >> stephen winick: so, one ofthe things that's interesting to us is the question of howthis recording from the library of congress ends up inlonnie donegan's repertoire.

well, in the yearsafter world war ii, the american government createdsomething called the united states informationservice which was setup to propagate americanculture around the world and it mostly took the form of libraries closelyassociated with your embassies. in grosvenor square in london,directly across the road from the, or across thesquare from the embassy, there was a usisbuilding and, again,

it was predominantly books, but in the basement therewas a record library and the record library was thelibrary of congress recordings; the entire catalog was thelibrary of congress recordings and if you gave them your name and address you could borrowone of those recordings. so, it's highly likely that theskifflers would get them there, because you couldn't kindof buy lead belly records. you know, lead bellywasn't released in,

you know, in the uk. you could get him in import andyou had to then know somebody who went to america in orderto do that, so to be able to have access tothose records on a, on a library basis was very,very important to those guys and a number of them i spoke towere very angry about donegan because he used to borrowthe records and keep them, and ron gould who was oneof the interviewees told me that he went into the library ofcongress and they checked for;

i think it was, he said i thinkhe said it was muddy waters that used to over farmand lomax's recordings, but muddy used to over farm. and he looked at itand he said, "well, it's been loaned outto a t. donegan." his real name istony, tony donegan and unfortunately he's lostit and ron gould was like, but so donegan's rationalewas that the library, the american embassy couldalways buy a new copy.

he couldn't. where was he going toget it, so he happily, i think it was a 4 shillingfine or something like that and he said he was happy to paythe fine and he had the record. >> stephen winick: one of the things that's funny isi later looked up a history of the usis and the librarianswere actually quite explicit about the fact thatthey didn't much mind if people stole materialsfrom the library,

because the whole point was to. >> stephen winick: get theamerican message out there. >> stephen winick: andif someone stole it that meant they reallyliked it and they'd share it with their friends andthat's exactly what happened. >> mary sue twohy: anddonegan really did that well. >> billy bragg: i'lltell ron gould that, but i don't think it willmake him feel any better. >> mary sue twohy: so, thepunk movement in the 1970s

and the skiffle emergencein the 1950s; how do you see them connected? >> billy bragg: well, i thinkthey're connected in the sense that skiffle was anempowering movement. you know, it was youngpeople making their own music in the same way thatpunk was in 1977. in some ways tried to beena kind of a little like punk in the sense that the tradguys were trying to get away from the commerciality ofcontemporary jazz which had sort

of mutated the kind that calledswing, big bands you know, crooners they wanted to get backto the basics of it and that, in that sense it's verysimilar to what the ramones and the [inaudible] weretrying to do just before punk when they were a pulled by thecommerciality of guitar rock and they were trying to getback to something purer. so, this, that kind ofis a little bit like, like punk as well, but the thingabout skiffle is it touches in so many of the foundingideas of punk world.

one of the key tenants of punkwas here's 3 chords now form a band, and of course thatwas true of skiffle, because you only needed 3chords to play almost all of donegan's repertoire. it was very much a hands on the[inaudible] music, in the sense that you know they werebuilding their own instruments. a key aspect of skiffle issomething called a tea chest bass which i think youcall a washtub bass, but a tea chest base was a, ifcan imagine a box like a crate

about a meter by a meterby just less than a meter. it was used for importingloose leaf tea from india and they used to literally cutthe top off and then use them as storage cases; all of ushave them in our attics at home so used for storage, butif you tip it upside-down so the base now becomes the topand you, you mount a broom pole to the edge and run a piece oftwine to the center and pull it through and tie it, youcan get a kind of a doom, doom, doom, doom noise.

it's not very in pitch, butit has the effect of that, so this is what they did. they made these, they madetheir musical instruments with stuff they couldbuy in a hardware shop. what could be morediy than that? you know, there'ssomething about diy. but i think most important ofall was the sense of empowerment that came with skiffle. the thing to me thatwas really attractive

about punk was itwas at year zero. it was like everything else thatcame before, out the window. forget it. i mean, obviously we've, wethought that, but at the time, it was like this is us, weare, we identify with this and we're differentfrom what went before. skiffle is that times ahundred, because we're talking about the first time ithappened in our culture, and what the symbol ofit is is the guitar.

the guitar is notan instrument common in british cultureup to that point. our folk music was predominantly if it was singing itwas unaccompanied, it was instrumental,it was fiddles and a squeeze box stufflike that, you know. it wasn't; guitars wereplayed by outsiders like singing cowboys, orcalypsonians, or bluesmen. so, in taking the guitar,donegan was introducing,

he was the first britain to geton the charts playing guitar, and it kind of gave thatgeneration of young men a symbol of their difference fromthe previous generation. so, the guitar becomesthe symbol of year zero. and i think that if you werea kid in 57 and you saw a sign that said "tonight skiffle", youwouldn't necessarily just expect to hear donegan songs. you would expect to hearmusic played on a guitar. skiffle means guitar music.

skiffle means a new beginning. skiffle means, you know, thatpunk meant a number of things, it meant you had the pistolsand the clash, but also ian dury by the blockheadsand stuff like that. >> mary sue twohy: but, punk didn't have thenever-ending contest, punk contest. >> billy bragg: no, that's true. that's true, but the, one of theproblems for the skifflist was

that they didn't,they were so young, many of them were so young. >> billy bragg: youknow, van morrison was 12 when he heard lead belly. george harrison was 13, paulmccarthy was 14, lennon was 16 when donegan played in liverpooland they all, you know, lennon formed the quarrymenwithin 2 weeks of seeing him. they were so young thatthey never did proper gigs like i do gigs.

a lot of punk bands did gigs. they were just playing in schoolhalls, you know, scout huts, church halls, coffee bars. they didn't make records. you know, there's anestimated between 30 and 50,000 skiffle bands playingat [inaudible] in 1957, but. >> billy bragg: theirall under 18. they're not making records. they don't have a career,

but what they dohave is competitions. they had skiffle contestsorganized which ended up with some of the, some ofthese bands appearing on tv and some were promisedrecord deals, but really it's how they allcut the teeth playing live. and you know, all thoseguys, i mean the skiffle, the beatles failedtheir skiffle band, the quarrymen failedtheir audition for a national skiffle contest.

they weren't up tospeed, but interestingly. >> mary sue twohy:that's amazing. interestingly, it was a whole, the whole thing was just acomplete con, because the person who had the loudest applausewon, so it was you know, you wanted to bringall your friends so the promoters made a fortune,but it was very serious. i mean, the finals,the finals was in a primetime tv programcalled come dancing which went

out on 7 o'clock on a fridaynight which was a huge, it's a ballroom dancing andmy parents watched it avidly. but the skiffle competitionfinal was in that program. it wasn't in some kids program. >> billy bragg: it wasthe absolute center of our, of our culture. and there's lots ofskiffle clubs too in. >> mary sue twohy: in soho. >> billy bragg: yeah, there,

well and around the countrydonegan encouraged people to form clubs. he had a sort of anewsletter which explained how to form a club and if you cameto play in town he would sort of try and get down there and they would get apre-released copy of his record and how to play itand stuff like that. which in some ways ledto the formation of some of the early folk clubs in mycountry, you know, that are sort

of the folk revival kindof came out of skiffle. >> mary sue twohy:can you talk to us about the flexi recordings,those little plastic ones? >> billy bragg: yeahi can, yeah. >> mary sue twohy: thatwas kind of fascinating. >> billy bragg: again, thereare obviously similarities with punk rock in thatthey were fanzines. people made, you know, xeroxfanzines that they sold around clubs and this oneband made some flexi discs;

flexi discs for those of you whoaren't old enough to remember is like a transparent plasticsquare with record grooves in it and you can staple itto a magazine and sell. and the eden street skifflegroup made the entire album; it's one of the very few skifflealbums actually they made an entire album of. >> billy bragg: these flexis andwhat you had to do is you had to fold the corners into thesleeve of the 7-inch sleeve which gave it some rigidityand then, and then put it on

and put an old english pennywhich is like a cartwheel and put it on top of theneedles and it would bounce up and down and they still play. i bought some on ebay andyou can still play them. they still work after over 60years; 60-year-old technology. >> billy bragg: verysimilar to punk then. >> stephen winick:yeah, i think the point of the flexi was you couldput it inside the magazine. >> stephen winick: andthe magazine would flex,

it wouldn't crackthe way a regular. >> billy bragg: or stick it onthe back of a corn flakes box. >> billy bragg: theywere very popular to put kid's musicon corn flakes boxes. so, so you mentioned theimportance of lead belly and other traditionalamerican songs which was a big part of skiffle. there was this other thingthat happened sort of late in skiffle that, that iwonder if you think of it

or how you think of it thatit's a those songs like "my old man's a dustman" or. >> stephen winick: "does yourchewing gum lose its flavor?" the. >> stephen winick: thenovelty songs of ended skiffle. >> stephen winick: is that kind of a betrayal ofthe skiffle idea? >> billy bragg: i'm not surethey're technically they're skiffle really stephen.

i think what happens islonnie donegan becomes an all-round entertainer. you guys see, lonnie insome ways is our elvis. you know, he's the very firstand, and it's worth mentioning that he recorded "rockisland line" on the 13th of july 1954 just a weekafter elvis presley recorded "it's alright mama" inmemphis with sam phillips, so they're almost simultaneous. >> stephen winick:you could argue it's

like the most importantweek in pop music. you could. what came out of that? but it's, and it'samazing that the, that it happened so closely. but just as elvis kind ofdidn't really know where to go and ended up going to vegas,well donegan kind of goes to these sort of novelty songs and so it betrays thecredibility he had,

because he has amazingcredibility in his early years among the, the young peopleplaying his music, so i think that because doneganis the only real superstar and his career sustainsafter the skiffle star wanes. what happens is it'ssuperseded by rock and roll. i don't think we can, my oldman's a dustman" kind of sort of finishes it forall the skifflers, it's like it's over;that's 1960.

although, i have to say, thatsame year the beatles went to hamburg and asconstituted at the time, the beatles wereharrison, mccarthy, and lennon the 3 guitarplayers from the quarrymen, pete best who was the son ofa woman they knew played a bit of drums and theirfriend who looked great but couldn't really playthe bass, but when they got to hamburg there was a,koschmider put a wrestler out to look after them, a bigold german wrestler to keep them

out of trouble and hewas interviewed by a dj, an american dj at the heightof beatle mania in the 1960s and the guy askedhim, "what were they like when they firstcame to hamburg?" and he said, "they played toomuch of that washboard music." you know, he said,"those british bands, they thought lonniedonegan was elvis." i mean, the implicationof that is that the beatles were stillmore or less a skiffle band

when they got to hamburg. i mean, because that's notthe way the legend goes, and i think you got toaccept that skiffle did carry on after donegan disappeared,because those kids are still, they're still playing,they've got the bug now. they're playing guitars andthey still, they're still, it's still as accessible asit was, but it was like a, it was kind of likea school ground, a playground crying skiffle.

it wasn't like a scene. it was like every [inaudible]school boy could play 3 chords on a guitar, you know,and you had a choice, you could play footballand impress your mates or play guitar andimpress girls. >> billy bragg: you can seethe attraction can't you? >> stephen winick: whatif you could both i mean? >> billy bragg: thatwould be impossible. >> billy bragg: i'venever seen anybody do both

at the same time. >> mary sue twohy: so,skiffle, skiffle has roots in traditional jazz and we'dlike to ask you about that and also talk about the 20-yearmusician's union embargo. >> billy bragg: oh, dearthat's a shameful episode. >> billy bragg: in our history. well, where would youlike me to start on that? >> mary sue twohy: let'sstart with traditional jazz and then we'll moveover to the embargo.

>> billy bragg: what can itell you about trad jazz? the a just sort of? >> mary sue twohy: i think thefact that, that it has roots, it's a major root of skiffle. >> billy bragg: it is yes. >> stephen winick: maybethe ken colyer story. >> billy bragg: theken colyer story. >> mary sue twohy: yeah,yeah that's a great, yes. >> billy bragg: it'ssuch a great story, yeah.

>> mary sue twohy: andthe jail scene too. >> billy bragg: yeahthat whole thing. well, the drivingforce behind trad jazz in the uk was a guy named kencolyer who's a trumpet player. and he was hugely frustratedby the fact that he was unable to see any of thesejazz bands play, because there was a band on,american bands touring in the uk between 1935 and 1955. it was a reciprocalband that originated

with the american federationof musicians who in 1934 said that british band leaders, jazz band leaders couldonly tour the united states of america if a, they useonly american musicians and b, if they took outamerican citizenship. it's the worst kindof protectionism and as someone who's alwaysbeen a supporter of unions, you can imagine howdisappointed i was particularly with music as well.

>> billy bragg: so, the britishministry of labour reciprocated on that and nobody toured. so, so for the jazzersafter the war, they couldn't learnreally how to play, because you see you only learn by seeing someonephysically do it. that's how you learn. you sat on the edge of thestage, that's what donegan did, it's what chris barberdid, all those guys did.

they sat there every night andwatched as close as you and i as they could to theguys who were playing. so, ken colyer realized thatsome of the original players, although they're in their60s and 70s, were still alive and playing in divesin new orleans. so, he hatched a plotto get to new orleans. except the only way you couldreally get to new orleans in those days was, well itwas almost impossible really, because not only becausethe travel and the distance

and the cost, but the britishgovernment wouldn't let you go out of the country withmore than about 10 pounds because of currency smuggling. so it was impossible. so he comes up withthis brilliant plan. he joins the merchant navy, themerchant marines and goes all around the world untileventually he gets, he gets a job in on a boatand goes to mobile, alabama. now when he gets tomobile he jumps ship,

gets the tourist fees for amonth and goes to new orleans, and he finds georgelewis band who backup on, backed up bunk johnsonon ken's favorite record. and there it just pleaseschuck to see some kid from england who's interestedin what they're doing, because they're playingto people their age; they're playing to 70-year-olds. you know, british, american,african-american guys in their 20s arelistening to beep-bop.

they're not listening toold time jazz, you know, that's grandad's music. so, not only doeshe know his stuff, he knows it so well hecan sit in with them. so, they invite him to geton the bandstand and play which is just incredible whenyou think about it, isn't it? >> mary sue twohy: howradical was that in itself? >> billy bragg: well that wasvery radical for a, you know, a white guy to playwith black musicians

and it ultimately cost him isliberty, because when he went to renew his visahe was a day late because his renewal datewas the 25th of december. now normally you might think, sorry about thatmate we weren't open, or you might say i'mafraid that's a misdemeanor and if you have a misdemeanorwhat happens to you? they put you in-house arrestin a hotel in a hostile and then they deport you.

but they put ken in jail. they jailed him and theimplication is really that they, you know, this is punishmentfor, for associating with african-american musicians. >> mary sue twohy: and hewas in jail for a while. >> billy bragg: he was in jail for a longtime, 38days without bail. this is a completelyunprecedented for someone on a visa violation, you know.

and whenever they ask him whatwe'd do if they let him out, he said i'll go andplay with those guys. i've come to learn. so, they just kept himlocked up as a subversive, because in those days to makea stand against jim crow was to be a subversive,was to be a communist. i mean, i have to say kenwas a bit of left-winger, but he was never a member ofor any of that kind of stuff, but he knew exactlywhat he was doing.

but the other side of the storyis, being in jail in louisiana, you know, that's like lead bellyterritory isn't it, you know? when he comes back toengland who is going to be able penitentiary blues with more authoritythan ken colyer? so it was like amazing. so, he writes to his brother. his brother gets allthese letters printed in the melody maker, so hisstories is one is well-known,

and when he comes home to, toengland he comes like the kind of trad jazz moses comingdown from the mountain with the tablets, you know. and chris barber, and lonniedonegan, and monty sunshine, ron bowden formed a band aroundhim, the ken colyer jazz band and they go on to carryforward the flag of trad jazz, the best trad jazzand it's, of course, that band that institutethe breakdown sessions. >> stephen winick:

and so skiffle comesdirectly out of there. >> billy bragg: yes,out that session yeah. >> stephen winick: so, anothergreat connection that you found for the book which you putin the book and which comes from the library of congress,is that there happens to be a terrificphoto in our prints and photographs divisionof bunk johnson who. >> stephen winick:was the trumpet player that ken colyer wentto look for.

>> billy bragg: the hero, yeah. >> stephen winick: withlead belly playing. >> stephen winick:guitar for him. >> mary sue twohy: oh! >> billy bragg: and he[multiple speakers]. >> billy bragg: in1947 i think, yeah. >> mary sue twohy:oh, i love it. >> billy bragg: yeah, 2verses, 1 [inaudible]. i was real pleased to seethat to find photograph,

yeah and it's publicdomain as well even better. so, you know, it's an interest;i didn't really know anything about jazz period andcertainly not trad jazz, so i found it really interestingto sort of follow ken. you know, ken was my kindof; there's a great book about his life called "goin'home; the uncompromising life and times of ken colyer" whichkind of goes in-depth in all that and he kind of like gaveme enough points of reference to be able to sort of work,you know, get off and check

out a few other names and tryand draw together a chapter that introduces englishaudiences to the significance of new orleans in our music. i think it's probably moreimportant than new york and more importantthan chicago really. it doesn't get that credibility,but, and it's like no other city in the united states asfar as i'm concerned. it's significance in thosedays was considerable, but when it was at the mouthof the mississippi, you know,

it was the kind ofpermeable membrane that the coach would pass through on its wayto the interior. you know, it wasn't the westcoast that, or the east coast or the west coast thatinfluenced the interior. it was big muddy and neworleans at end of it. i think people, they lostsight of that a little bit. >> mary sue twohy:and benignets too. can't forget them.

>> stephen winick: so, wetalked about a couple of groups of people, the trad jazz peopleand lonnie donegan and his crew, but there was one other group ofpeople that you mentioned a lot in the book and thatyou talk about a bit which is the americanexpats who happen to be. >> stephen winick: inlondon at that time. >> billy bragg: bycoincidence, yeah. by incredible coincidence,just at a time when lead belly's music

and woody guthrie's music isbecoming significant in the uk, there were 3 characters who justso happened to be in london, the first and perhaps themost important was alan lomax who having worked forthe library of congress since the 1930s came undersuspicion in the years after the second world war ofduring the red scar basically because he was promotingafrican-american culture. i think that's allit could have been. and he decided that it mightbe in his best interest

to go abroad for a while. he got a gig making ananthology of world music for cbs which involved him scouringeurope for recordings and he based himself in london. he was actually in londonwhen "rock island line" got in the charts which musthave been really weird for him not only, you know,did he know lead belly, but he was kind of,you know, wasn't there when it was recorded butobviously he took part

in the propagationof all that stuff. ramblin' jack elliott wasalso in london at the time. he really didn't have anyprofile in the uk at all; he wasn't even ramblin'in those days, but he and his new wife junehammerstein were traveling around the world or trying totravel around the world busking and playing guitar and hekind of turned up at the time when people, you know, nobodyhad ever seen a real cowboy. i know jack wasn't a realcowboy, but he had been

in a rodeo; he did run awayto [multiple speakers]. he was a rodeo cowboy,yeah, yeah. and his cowboy persona,i mean again, ron gould who saw him playsaid, he said he had levis on. i'm like, yeah wow. that's incredible ron and,you know, and he had a hat. so, it was like clearly what; hehad a flat top martin as well, he had a flat top martinwhich nobody had seen and he could just playin a lot of styles.

he just was brilliant at it. and peggy seeger was also. >> mary sue twohy: peggy seeger. >> billy bragg: inthe uk at that time. she'd in some ways the redscale [inaudible] in her family, her father charles seegerwho was a very similar to john lomax was acollector of songs. he had his, i think he hadhis passport impounded. so, she decided to cut outand went to study in europe

and lomax hooked up with her andbrought her to london and so, yeah they all kind of,they took the opportunity that you know the first skiffleclub opened in soho in 1955, well the first one that wehave records for, there was a, a specific skiffle club ratherthan a jazz club with skiffle in it which was theprevious experience of it. the first standaloneskiffle-blues club at the roundhouse opened inthe late 1955 just before "rock island line" came out.

so, there was alreadya scene, you know. donegan's record appears onthe back of a of scene there, but you have to, the one thingyou have to grasp about all that stuff is the contextfor british youth, you know. these are kids who had grown upin a time of war and rationing. the war ended in 1945,rationing didn't end until 1954. so, there was all this kind ofsuppressed sort of want that was as simple as not beingable to go in a sweet shop and buy whatever you want.

i mean, john lennonwas a born in 1940. he was 14, he could do that. >> mary sue twohy: and theyhad income too, the teenagers. >> billy bragg: well, yeah. >> billy bragg: they kindof left school at 15. lennon didn't. he went to art school,but a whole car drive of working class youthleft school in 54-55 and they easily foundemployment.

they had money. the young women went out andbought cosmetics and clothes and records, and theyoung men bought guitars. and i think that's sort of, and one of the reasons whyi think they bought guitars, and it's just a theory of mine, but when in 1955 is significantis because when "rock around the clock" becomes ahit and that's on the back of the movie "blackboard jungle"which is the opening titles.

but it also doesn't reallyget played on the bbc. it gets played in luxembourg,which is [inaudible] from central europe and afn andthe american forces' network, but the bbc kind of ignoresit and i'm just thinking that maybe there was an impulsefrom them kids;" you're going to ration rock androll as well?" >> billy bragg: "youthink you're going to ration rock and roll, right. i tell you what we're going todo, we're going to buy guitars

and we're going to playthis shit whether you like it or not." i think there was a bit ofthat in there, you know. >> billy bragg: because theyhad been deprived for so long. >> billy bragg: of thesort of comforts of life and now they had some moneyto spend, and they were able through that to definethemselves. that's how first teenagersand they define themselves, for the young menthey define themselves

by playing the guitar. they become visible; a differentculture from their parents and for the young women,they define themselves by colonizing the coffeebars, the cappuccino bars. they go into those spaces. they want their own socialspace and they don't want to go into tea rooms with the mumsstill come and they can't go in a pub on theirown without geezers, so they go into the cappuccinobars and what's significant

about that, is that thecappuccino bars are looking to milan and paris and rome. they're not looking at new york. it's quite sophisticatedfor that time, you know. this is jean seberg, robert[phonetic], and marilyn monroe. i think that, that's how theyoung women turned their back on what had been predominantly since the 30s really anamerican-based culture and they looked towards europe.

that's how they definedthemselves as different. so, these, this contextis really important for that first generation tosort of say, "we are different and this is how we're goingto express our difference." >> stephen winick: but a reallyinteresting point that you make in the book and thatyou just made here which i think seems weirdto modern people is the idea that this was the firstgeneration of teenagers; that teenagers, as a thing,didn't exist before that.

>> billy bragg: no, no. and in some ways, evenafter 55 for middleclass and upper class kids,teenagers still didn't exist, because what happened for themiddle class kids they tended to go to university andthen into professions which deferred earnings untilthey were adults, you know, law or medicine orsomething like that. so, that; because thething that you know as always what definesteenagers is what they buy,

what they consume, what theywear, you know, their style. so, this was the first timeworking class youth had been visible to popular culture. if we look between thewars, there are teenagers, the flappers and that, butthey are almost all upper class or middleclass girls who arevisible to the mainstream media of the day, you know, workingclass youth are just you know they're just a blur, they're notreally; they may have some sort of culture, but you don'treally see it, you don't really,

it's not a, it's nota mainstream culture. the thing about skiffleis it's in, it's straight down the mainstream, youknow, it kind of breaks into public consciousnessin a way that youth culturehad never done before. >> mary sue twohy: even withguitars, the 'skiffle junior.' toy guitars. >> mary sue twohy: did you eversee one of them and hold it? >> billy bragg: i've seen,

yes i have seen a'skiflle junior' guitar. there's one in a record shop indemark street in london going up on a wall in arecord shop there. and. >> mary sue twohy: thisis the one with the ears? of course, they're all theones with the ears yeah. it's got ears on it becauseit was originally a mickey mouse guitar. >> billy bragg: made as a disneyspinoff and then they kind

of repurpose it by puttingillustrations in the ears, the [inaudible] ears; thebody of the guitar it looks like mickey mouse's face face-onand it's more like a ukulele than a guitar, it's only got 4strings and it's a toll wreck of getting tuned, but yeah. everybody, it was a total craze;it was a really skiffle was more like the, you know thefidget spinners things that going on in the moment. you aware of thatin the playgrounds?

it was much more like that than it was punk rockin the way it grew. you know, it was a craze. every sentient school boy couldplay 3 chords on the guitar, and what's significantabout that, is that when chuck berry comesalong 5 months later playing guitar like ringing a bell,everyone can play his repertoire and then what happens then isthat the, when your teenagers, because of that, ourteenagers have learned this

when they're 13-14-15. when your teenagers arethinking about playing guitars when they're 17-18-19, theycontend with our teenagers, they're already in hamburg. >> billy bragg: they'realready in hamburg. so, what happens is when thebeatles break america in 64, there's a whole cohort ofroad-hardened bands ready to come piling in and takethe american charts by storm and it's skiffle that givesour kids that [inaudible]

after 2 years edge on yourteenagers who were kind of playing guitars, butthey're not writing songs and they're not, youknow, they're kind of playing the pops of the day. they're not thinking ofit as a, as a career. where our kids have alreadyfocused on flying, you know. >> stephen winick: yeah, whatwas the george harrison quote that you mentioned thatconnects skiffle, right, with, with rock and roll?

>> billy bragg: it's one ofmy favorite quotes actually. george harrison was asked ifthe beatles were influenced by the blues, and he said,"yeah, of course we were. no lead belly, nnolonnie donegan, no lonnie donegan, no beatles." and that sort of sumsit up really, you know. that sums up howthe process worked and how skiffle was the kind ofnursery for the british invasion of the american chartsbetween, between 1964

when the beatles had their firstnumber 1 in january and the end of 65, there's a britishgroup at number 1 in america for 52 weeks out of 104. >> billy bragg: andevery single one of those bands was originallya skiffle group apart from petula clarkwho is the exception, because she when rock[inaudible] she had kind of actually already put out a dozen singlesunder her own name.

she didn't need lonniedonegan to. >> mary sue twohy: but thereare some women in skiffle. >> billy bragg: there are. there are some women in and important women,very important women. nancy whiskey who sings"freight train" which was a hit in the united states, as wellas, in the uk; hilda simms and shirley bland in the cityramblers absolute key aspects of that, but what they are a lotof, because the skifflers were

so young, 98% of them nevermade in the recordings. it just, it was skiffle wasgone by the time they were, they were still playing. so what is left is loadsand loads and loads of black and white photographs of kalo[phonetic] youths playing, you know, cheap oldguitars and tea-chest bass. there are literallyevery local newspaper in the uk has a filefull of these bands, because they were bignews in the, you know,

in the 50s, so a good copy. >> mary sue twohy: and theywere, they were having a ball. >> billy bragg: theywere having a ball. >> billy bragg: but i've seenloads and loads and loads of those pictures and i don'tthink i've seen a handful of women in any ofthose pictures. one or 2 bands have,might have a woman at the back playingthe tea-chest bass. i did one, come acrossan entire band of women,

but on a closer inspection theywere actually rs travelers. it was the mom andthe 3 daughters and they were just dressing upplaying skiffle for the picture. there's a story attached toit, and i don't know why, but it was something that reallyconnected with, with kids. it may be that it was guyswho were playing guitars; i saw where it waslead belly, or broonzy, or elvis, or bill halley. there weren't, you know,

there was no wonderjacks' in the uk, you know. >> billy bragg: so,there wasn't, the girl singers were you knowmostly singing with big bands like petula clark andthey were, you know, i have to say they wererather sort of simpering. whereas, the guitar players wereoutcasts; they were dynamic; they were roustabouts. >> billy bragg: andyou can see that sort of attachment for that.

>> billy bragg: and it's hardto go back and, it's very hard to go back and get into themindset of what it would be like to hear rock onlinefor the first time. >> billy bragg: we'reso, we're so you know, we're so past that, you know. >> billy bragg: we've notlived down to our lives in a time of ration and war. we've not had to listen to theeverything mediated by the bbc and rationed out to us,so it's hard to get back.

you can only really sort of tryand look at what the evidence is and extrapolate how and why. so, i may totally bewrong, but i do believe that young women were a keydriving force in skiffle, because their colonization of the coffee bars is what drawsskiffle into the coffee bars and it's only when skiffle comes into coffee barsit really starts to evolve into rock and roll.

>> billy bragg: in that sense,in terms of british rock and roll, skiffle is kind ofthe noise you hear on the track when a train is comingin a tube station. that's what skiffle isto british rock and roll. it's the standalone thing. it's a completelydifferent thing. it's not, it wasn't supposedto lead to rock and roll, but that's the role it plays. it kind of lets youknow it's coming

and it's coming soon, you know. >> mary sue twohy: andwhat about stan freberg and his sniffle group? >> billy bragg: well, this isanother very interesting thing. when lonnie donegan has ahit in the united states of america with, with hisversion of "rock island line", the great stan frebergdoes a mickey-take record of it, joking with it. but what's significant

about that is the flipsideis a mickey-take of elvis and donegan and elvis again. >> billy bragg: they'reas equals as far as stan was concerned, youknow, and donegan significantly, donegan was marketed in the usin 56 as the irish hillbilly. he was neither irish, he wasactually born in scotland. >> billy bragg: andlived most of his life in london nor was ahillbilly, but the significance of that term is that at the timeelvis presley was being called a

hillbilly cat, so thiswas putting donegan in the same category,the hillbilly category and i mean even peoplelike, you know, slim whitman wascalled a hillbilly. anyone with a guitar at the timein the charts was a hillbilly. it was hillbillymusic, the guitar. the jazz magazines in britaindismissed donegan having a hit with "rock island line" in terms of his dreadful hillbilly musicthat's coming from america.

bobby [inaudible], slimwhitman, and you know, a tennessee ernieford "sixteen tons." there was a number of hitsin 55 sort of cowboy songs that are going to the charts andthe jazzers saw donegan as parts of that and it may be why"rock island line" was put out that decca recordswere looking for someone to match these guys, becauseall the british singers were, even they were singingcountry songs, would wear a dinner jacket anda bow tie and they had no one

who looked like, you know, theykind of ridden off the plains and that's donegan, and thatmight have been, you know, that might have been some of thereason why, because as i said, it was originally recorded inthe context of a jazz record in 1954 and then suddenlygets released in late 1955. obviously it had "rock"in the title and "rock around the clock"had been a hit, so it might have beensomething to do with that. but it really is a completefluke, no one sat down

and said right, let's havea skiffle before, you know, the skiffle burst, no. it's not, it's not like that. in fact, the actualrecord the 10-inch single of "rock island line" says theword "jazz" on the label twice. >> billy bragg: so, youknow and it's a, you know, an american folk songsung by a blues guy, i mean you know, it's kind of. >> billy bragg: although,

but the way it comes togetherit's all just classic sort of cut-cut thing. >> mary sue twohy: and it'sinteresting, at one point in the book you describefred hellerman. >> billy bragg: yeah,poor old fred. >> mary sue twohy: right onstage with lonnie donegan. >> mary sue twohy:and then what happens? >> billy bragg: well, whendonegan comes to the us, although the band aren'ttouring, american musicians tour

in the uk and the ukmusicians tour in the us. >> mary sue twohy: becausethe embargos were lifted. >> billy bragg: yeah, theembargo has ended, yeah. >> billy bragg: in 55. donegan's one of the firstto benefit from that. he's not allowed tobring his guitar. he's not allowedto play his guitar. the afn won't lethim play his guitar. >> mary sue twohy:can you imagine?

>> billy bragg: yeah, exactly. >> stephen winick: so he hasto hire someone to play guitar for him [multiple speakers]? >> billy bragg: he hasto hire someone to play. on the ed sullivan show the guywho plays guitar in the band on the ed sullivan show is thesame guy who plays the intro to mrs. robinson bysimon and garfunkel. >> mary sue twohy: oh my. >> billy bragg: that's asort of side fact there.

but yeah, he does a kind of astand supper club in brooklyn and they get fred hellermanto come and play for him; fred hellerman from the weavers. >> billy bragg: i suppose because he's singinglead belly songs. fred hellerman, youknow, i mean he played at lead belly's funeral, i meanhe knew lead belly very well, but he didn't really appreciate of what lonnie wasdoing with his songs.

so, lonnie's wifesinging was to speed up; that was his whole thing. that's what made him soexciting to the british kids to get a kind of runawaytrain theme to it. hellerman didn't like that. he didn't like that, so or actually he suddenlypassed away last year, but i spoke to himbefore he passed away and he didn't likelonnie at all.

he didn't like him andi can understand that, because you know, he saidhe didn't you know he didn't respect the material and theaudience didn't respect it and i, you know. it's understandable. the audience who came to see donegan were elvis'audience; there weren't. >> billy bragg: lead belly andthe weavers audience you know. so, what happens is leadbelly, donegan goes out on tour

on a rock and roll tour withchuck berry and clyde mcphatter and a lot of other bands, andhe's allowed to play the guitar but he has to, he'sbacked up the pit orchestra in every place they play. they played 11 shows a day andhe plays 2 songs starting at 11 in the morning, no fooduntil nighttime and he, he's not getting onvery well with this. and when they get todetroit the, johnny burnette from the rock and roll trio,

perhaps the greatest rockabillyband that side of sunshine and elvis to ever perform,say to him "listen man, why don't you let us back youup on these songs, you know, because we love whatyou're doing." and donegan was like "oh,i couldn't afford that." and johnny burnette says, "man, it's not about moneyjust let us back you up." so, they do. they work together and ithink this is significant

that skiffle meetsrockabilly in 56 in detroit and they recognize oneanother as kings, you know, and the fit together likehand and glove, you know. and in some ways rockabillyis similar to skiffle in that it too wassuperseded by rock and roll. what we said, rockabilly needsno drums, percussive bass, a couple of guitars you know, nopiano and those kinds of things. but what is significantabout skiffle in terms of what happened inthe united states

of america why skiffle isn'tthe same, it's not you know, because there are artistswho were inspired by that. i mean, dave van ronk and somefriends make a skiffle album inspired by "rock islandline" that's really more or less a junk band album. so, you can say that it wasinfluenced, but what is missing, the significant thing that ismissing in the united states of america to make skifflean indigenous british thing, is an entire cohort

of 12-year-olds playinglead belly songs. you never, you never had that. and i'm not sayingthat out of disrespect, i'm just saying thisis the thing. >> billy bragg: that makesskiffle different and special. that's missing in theunited states of america. i can't think of any 50smovement that had that kind of reach so far into youthculture as skiffle did, because that's themost significant thing

about skiffle as well. it's not what happenedin 55-56-57, it's what happensin 64-65-66-67. that's the significance of it. it's what they go on to do. >> billy bragg: and i don'tthink there's, you know, you may know better thanme, but i can't think of a, of a genre in american musicthat had that same dynamic. >> stephen winick:like prepared kids for.

>> billy bragg: that dynamic. >> stephen winick: yeah, yeah. >> billy bragg: yeah, soi mean you know it's all, and it hasn't happenedsince in my country. it was a, it was a unique moment and that's the real reason whywe need to understand skiffle and appreciate skiffle. it has that depth to it. it's not just a guymade a record and.

>> billy bragg: bythe beatles, you know. it was just the usualway the story is told. well, let's talk a littlebit about the process of writing the bookof doing a book. so, one of the thingsthat i found interesting in your description to mewas your use of social media to connect with formerskifflers. that was, that wasreally great that was, because there's a photographicarchive of some of which i use

in the book thatwas put together by a guy called eric winsorwho ran a folk magazine, and that had been inheritedby ian anderson at folk roots and he has a really greatfacebook page where he puts up all these old photographs andhe had a specific skiffle album which had some lovelypictures of jack elliott, big bill broonzy, and the cityramblers and all these guys and at the, at the skiffle andblues club, the original skiffle and blues club and, ofcourse, under these photographs

in the conversation there werepeople saying "i was there." you know, "i remember these. that's me in the corner." >> mary sue twohy: my goodness. >> billy bragg: youknow, i'm like, so i just contactedthose people. >> billy bragg: and was ableto go interview them and find out from their perspectivewhat was going on which i don't think i wouldbeen able to do otherwise.

but also, i did a lotof research on ebay. >> billy bragg: british ebay,in the uk if you put "skiffle" into the search engine and"vinyl" it throws up all eps because they're, you know,they're cheap as chips and i was interested in them. you can pick themfor you know a fiver. >> billy bragg: and becauseskiffle comes at a time when they were movingbetween the 10-inch 78 format to the 7-inch vinyl format

and so what i did wasevery time donegan put out 2 singles they compliedthem on to an ep and put it out in the 7-inch version. and to encouragepeople to buy it, it comes in a very nice picturesleeve with a lot of details on the back; a lotof information where it's recordedand stuff like that. so, there's a lot of theseskiffle eps out there and it was very, very helpfulfor chronology and dating

and you know whoplayed what and so. >> stephen winick: sopeople scan the whole sleeve [multiple speakers]. >> billy bragg: of course,they're trying to search it. >> stephen winick:yeah, right, yeah. >> billy bragg: yeah,[multiple speakers]. sometimes they scan the label. >> billy bragg: that'seven better. so, yeah that wasyou know the amount

of screenshots i got from, iprobably got more screenshots from skiffle than i didfrom the british library. >> billy bragg: it'sfunny isn't it? >> stephen winick: that is,that's really strange right >> >> billy bragg: that'sreally strange. >> mary sue twohy: and'pete' frame, he has. >> billy bragg: yeah, 'pete' frame is a keycharacter for me in this.

he wrote a book called"a restless generation." 'pete' frame is famous inthe uk for constructing rock and roll family trees. handwritten. >> billy bragg: handwritten. >> stephen winick: thoseare amazing, yeah, yeah. >> billy bragg: myfavorite one he did, he did a billy bragg once. >> stephen winick: very nice.

>> billy bragg: whichwas just me. just me in the middle. it just said "billybragg guitar, vocal." >> stephen winick: that's nice. >> billy bragg: buthe gave that a number, because he gives them allnumbers and everything. he did it for a songbookof mine, billy bragg familytree, just me on my own. i was so proud of it, yeah.

and he's a lovely geezer, sohe's a lovely geezer and he's, he wrote "the restlessgeneration" which is probably thebest book on that period in our musical history. and he dealt with skiffle, but he didn't follow kencolyer to new orleans. he referred to that and he, youknow, he put all the characters in there and it was aguiding light for me, but i kind of took a chunkof what he was doing and dug

down from there,you know, dug down. and some, well a couple of thereviews have compared my book to "the restless generation" and i'll tell youthat's a great honor. a real honor. and there's a couple ofgood books on skiffle, one written by chasmcdevitt whose skiffle inside of the story. chas was actually a rival ofdonegans and he had a hit with

"freight train" here in theus and another one called the "the skiffle craze" bymike dewe who's an academic at the universityof aberystwyth, but both of them experiencedskiffle and their books are from the perspective ofsomeone who was there. what i didn't have wascontext and often what i do with the book isput it into context. i'm most proud of the fact that "rock island line"comes out in chapter 13.

you know, halfwaythrough the book. >> billy bragg: it doesn'tstart with donegan, you know. most of the, mostof the biographies of british rock starsmentioned skiffle and the treat "rock island line" as asingularity whereas, it wasn't. it was a moment of manyforces coming together over a long period suddenlysparking something and i tried to put skiffle in and that'sthe little point of the book is to put it in its propercontext in british pop culture.

well, there seems to bekind of a, a cyclical nature to your becoming an experton skiffle in the sense that, you know, you started outwith this interest in simon and garfunkel who had learnedfrom martin carthy who. >> stephen winick: wasa skiffler and something that also struck me was that,was that one of the first hits that was made out of oneof your songs was made by kirsty maccoll. >> stephen winick: andher dad is in your book.

>> billy bragg: ewanmaccoll yeah. it is very strange actuallythe way "what goes around, comes around" in folk music, but i mean i've alwaysbeen interested in skiffle in the sense that it alwayshad so many similarities to me with punk rock and i thinkit really helped me to look at skiffle through thatprism when i was writing it to understand how, because ofmy own experience with punk, how a musical movementmight empower someone;

it might me think, youknow, i am now at the center of our culture which ishow i felt with punk, you know, had a dynamic to it. so, i think that,that really helped. and in trying to articulateit to a young generation and to you know americansand other people from abroad, i think using punk asa point of reference at least we have something thatwe, you know, a common framework in which to explainwhere this is going.

>> mary sue twohy: the, in themid50s, there were over 25, actually more than 25. >> billy bragg: fiftythousand possibly, 50, up to 30 to 50,000. >> mary sue twohy: sowhere are they today? >> billy bragg: well, oneof them, one of them was on the cliff just before i camehere, an old bald guy passed me and he said "i've justread your book sonny." and i was like, "oh, great."

and he told me about when he was in a skiffle band hedidn't [inaudible] doing it. and most of them just,that was their moment. their moment was, i mean,the band on the front cover. i mean this is a stock picture. >> mary sue twohy:i love this picture. we chose this, this is abrilliant picture of us, but part of the reason whyis because in the background, you probably can'tsee it, there's lots

of old people laughing. >> stephen winick: yeah,yeah [multiple speakers]. >> billy bragg: it reallysums up the generation. well about 2 weeks ago i gota tweet from the son-in-law of the bloke playingthe washboard, and last week just before i camei had chat with him on the phone and the band are calledthe wild five and they're from stockport in, justoutside of manchester. so yeah, they kind of in their,

in their youth they weretouched by a fire, you know. and they didn't allgo on to play music. they, very few of themwent on to have careers, but all of them werethere in that moment and that was their moment. it was the thingthat we a part of and they have neverforgotten it. >> billy bragg: and they'restill proud of it and you talk to these old guys and they,you know, they remember

as if it was yesterday. i mean, they won oneof the competitions, one of the skiffle competitions. >> mary sue twohy:oh, that's right. >> billy bragg: that's whatthis photograph celebrates. it was them coming back fromwinning a competition, you know. and it really meant somethingto them and in some ways it kind of defined their youth inthe way punk defines my youth and i know i bore myfamily with talking

about the clash and the jam. my son's like "awe,dad you know i can't. will you stop?" he's only jealous he never sawthem, you know, it's like a lot of those things, but so youknow they most of them went on with their lives, but theyall somewhere have a picture they show their grandchildrenof the day they, they played on six-five special or something likethat, you know.

>> mary sue twohy: that's right. >> mary sue twohy: are thereany skiffle clubs still in existence? >> billy bragg: no not really. no. i would say that impulsehas moved on to other forms of music now, grime wouldbe the nearest to skiffle in the uk [inaudible] inits invigorating dynamic, empowerment and allows thaturban, black urban youth to communicate with therest of the world in a way

that the skifflers sentout a message there. the grime community is stillusing music to do that. most teenagers now are usingdigital social media platforms, but grime still has edgeand still has power. it was the grime i [inaudible]corbyn in the election. nobody else did a pop onlythe weird folkies like me. but, yeah it was veryinteresting because it seems, it says to me that they'restill, they still believe that music has something to say.

>> billy bragg: you know, because it's people keep askingwhere's all the protest music, but they're problem isi think they're looking for white boys with guitars. >> billy bragg: the cheeringis over there with itself. >> mary sue twohy:it certainly exists. >> billy bragg: it does. yeah, it is everywhere. >> mary sue twohy:it's everywhere, yeah.

>> billy bragg: but itjust doesn't have the same, the same cultural force. i think, i think musichas lost its van gogh with the new culture. it's still there and it stillhas important things to say and bring people together or make them feelthey're not alone, but it's not the social medium, the single soul searchingmedium was in the 20th century

where they actually encapsulateeverything from skiffle to you know politicsand football and love and everything. you know, that, thattime has passed. well, let's talkabout a couple of sort of maybe related projects. >> billy bragg: sure. >> stephen winick: i'massuming that the album "shine a light" was, it cameout of the research textbook.

>> billy bragg: it did, yeah. i was looking at therepertoire of the skifflers. i became aware ofthe huge number of american railroad songs thatthere were and the importance of the railroad inamerican culture. that kind of got me thinkingabout, about making them and i was already writingthe book when i got invited to do a photo documentary tocelebrate the 90th birthday of robert frank, aswiss-american photographer.

and this magazine called"aperture" hooked me up with an american photographernamed alec soth to go on a journey and alec wantedto come out on the road with me and i'm like "alec,that is so boring mate." you know, day-after-day. he said, "well, why don'twe go somewhere then. where have you always wantedto go and you've never been in the united statesof america?" i was already writing thebook them, and i said,

"i tell you where i want to go." and i said, "i wantto go to rock island where the rock islandline comes from." >> billy bragg: and hesaid, "where is that in?" i said, "i don't know. go and find out." so, it turns outit's on the illinois. >> stephen winick: that's right. >> billy bragg: iowaborder on the mississippi.

it's significance is that'swhere the first bridge was built out of the mississippi andwe did a drive from there to cummins prison farm where"rock island line" was recorded. >> mary sue twohy: oh, wow. >> billy bragg: in 1935. we followed the route of therailway, there was nobody there. and it was during thatthat i came to realize that there was only onepassenger train a day in little rock, through littlerock which really blew my mind,

because you know i live in acountry where i'm 140 miles from london in a rural area and there's 2 trainsevery hour to london. it's just like icouldn't believe it. and when the train came,the train came at midnight; the train guy out of losangeles, they're going to chicago from los angeles. so, we went down there to playmidnight special while it left, you know, because we thought itwas funny and the train came in

and it just sat therefor 20 minutes. people with their smokesand freight trains went by and it transpired thatthere's so few passenger trains that when they get to a railwaystation there is a couple of platforms, they have a waittime while the freight trains go by. they don't just stop andpick-up passengers and leave. they stop and just sit there until all the freight behindthem has gone by, and then they.

>> stephen winick: so, they goin the hole essentially like. >> billy bragg: exactly. and i realized then thatwe would have, you know, you would have time toget off and find a space and record a song ifyou were so inclined. so, i played with joe henryto do that and that's more or less what we did from chicagoto los angeles via san antonio in march of last year. >> mary sue twohy: thanks tocoordinating with the porters.

>> billy bragg: well, yeahwe had to talk to the porters on the train and explain to themwe weren't actually getting off, that we were youknow making a record. nobody seemed to mind. we didn't, we didn't getpermission from anyone. we just went and did it. but you know, 2 guysplaying acoustic guitars in a railway station is not abig deal anyway is it really? >> billy bragg: yeah,that's kind of like.

>> mary sue twohy: no. >> stephen winick: thathappens all the time. >> billy bragg: i wassurprised no one came over and gave us a coupleof quarters, yeah. >> stephen winick: it's therecording equipment that's a little weird. >> billy bragg: well,but that's. >> stephen winick: but, yeah. >> billy bragg: you know, butthat was just like a tree thing

with a couple of mics on them. it was. >> billy bragg: ofguys videoing; no one really paid us any mind. >> billy bragg: there was so few people gettingon and off anyway. yeah, some of the passengerswho were having a smoke kind of watched us, you know,they'd follow us in and watch us doing it, butreally, no one really cared.

i mean, they were all busy doingwhat they were doing, you know, buying coffee and stuff likethat, get back on the train. it was a lot of fun actually. >> mary sue twohy: okay, youknow a lot of people who tour like yourself and make brand newrecordings regularly are usually not riding 400-pagehistorical books, >> mary sue twohy:can you illuminate us on how this happened? >> billy bragg: well, i've beendoing it for a longtime now.

you know, sort of 33 odd yearsreally since i first came to america and i wasalready doing it for 5 years in a little punkband before that, and when you've donesomething like "tooth and nail" which is quite a big project,you know, there's a lot of blood and silver involved in that. you need to do something to takeyour mind off of it, you know, just fall into the next project. you need to sort ofclear the air a bit.

so, in order to just sortof slow things down a bit, being able to say i'm sorry but he's not availablehe's writing a book, isn't actually a bad way toputting off possibly being at one's beck and call. so, i had alreadywritten a book before. i wrote a book called "theprogressive patriot" in 2006. this book actually i was alot more disciplined on it. i worked out how to do itin a way that was practical

to family life andgetting things done. what i basically did was i'dgo once a month to london to the british library wherethey have all old music papers and jazz magazinesand stuff like that, and i would some research thereand then most days i would write from 3 until 5 andthen from 6 until 8. so, you know, i did all the sortof day-to-day stuff before that. i didn't always, youknow, in the 3 until 5, i didn't always get my thread,find my thread, but generally

from 6 until 8 i usually gotto write you know 500 words, sometimes better than that. >> mary sue twohy: great. >> billy bragg: so, yeah. so, it was a you know and theni would have a break on weekends and so i would come back to iton monday again all, you know. there's a lot ofreading involved. i'm kind of, that's kind of one my favoritehobbies anyway reading,

so i kind of enjoy that and because i didn't know a hugeamount about traditional jazz or jazz period, it was a lotof discovery for me as well which was interesting, youknow, and sort of reading. a key text was samuel charters'book about new orleans a trumpet on the corner, "a trumpet aroundthe corner" which just came out about 3 or 4 years agowhich is just brilliant. i was hoping to speakto sam because he played on that dave vanronk skiffle record,

but sadly he passed away. he passed away last year ithink and he was in sweden. i was trying to get over thereto talk to him, but yeah that's, that's really, reallya great book. and so yeah, it was,it was very engaging. i really enjoyed it, you know. it was something thati; i already sort of knew the ken colyer story. i knew, for the 50thanniversary of the recording

of "rock island line" ihad written an article for the guardian becauselonnie donegan had passed away and there was a big, biggig at the royal albert hall and his widow had got in touchwith me and asked me if i come and represent woody, becausedonegan was the first person that put woody inthe charts at home. >> billy bragg: and i sang "deador alive" with his whole band, and the guardian asked if iwould write something about, about donegan and it wasliterally was the week

of the 50th anniversary. so, i went back to thestudio which is still there. it's now the english [inaudible]space, and i managed to get in touch with hughmendl the producer. so, i had a firsthand accountof the recording session which i think is as fair arecount, there's a number of different recounts aboutwhat happened, but hugh sounds to me the most likelyturn of events. so, yeah so i hadkind of those pieces,

but i wasn't really surehow they fit together. and the story ofthe first generation of british teenagers is kindof out there and, you know, some of my relativeswere involved in that. my uncle dave and my auntiechris when they were dating went to see the "rock around theclock" movie and were involved in turning on the hoses in thecinema when the riot broke out. >> mary sue twohy: oh,so they were there. >> billy bragg: theywere there, yeah.

so. >> billy bragg: so,i got to sit down and talk to them about that. >> stephen winick:that's great, yeah. >> billy bragg: thatwas really interesting. much to my cousin'sannoyance when she found out that i had this longchat, i said to my cousin "i've got it on the phone now. i'll mail it to you."

and they never toldme about that, so i'm like okay alright i'mgoing to, i'll mail it to you. so, yeah but it wasgreat, because they did, they had seen buddyholly as well and they saw cliff richard youknow it was really great talking to them. so, yeah i really enjoyed itand i met some amazing people. hilda simms. >> billy bragg: who's was inthe city ramblers, you know,

she was sort of a, she was notso irish, she was a communist and she had been to the sovietunion and stuff like that. and what she wanted to showme where their original house where they lived was wasnear the science museum and the science museum added anexhibit of russian cosmonauts from the 1960s, so i took hilda. we went all around there. the exhibition wasjust brilliant, we had such a great time andthen we did the interview

in the science museum canteen. she was great. >> billy bragg: and still is. she's still going gigs actually. >> mary sue twohy: did yourecord those interviews or? >> billy bragg: yeah,i did yeah. so you have an archive. >> billy bragg: i do havea little archive, yeah. in fact, i think my, imight have my van morrison

on interview stillon my phone actually. >> stephen winick: well you knowtodd whom you met earlier is our acquisitions coordinator. >> billy bragg: oh. >> stephen winick: so, wemight get in touch with him. >> billy bragg: oh, alright. well. >> mary sue twohy: thatcat is out of the bag. >> billy bragg: the goodnews is i still have them.

the bad news is i'm areally bad interviewer, because i talk across people. i listen back and i say,"what are you doing?" why do you, there's a memorycoming there and you just talk, because i'm used tobeing interviewed. you can't help it. i'm like, i'll sitback and think "oh, why don't you just shut up?" "shut up already."

"don't talk." but yeah, i was, it was greathaving that sort of opportunity to talk one-to-one with people. it threw-up some strange things. one british rock star ofthe 1960s who i had a point of reference of him in the 1960ssaying how much lonnie donegan was a huge influence on him. pointblank denied heever even played skiffle and i had to say okay.

it's not in the book, but. >> stephen winick: but i've gotthis picture here in the book. >> billy bragg: i justhave to accept that. >> billy bragg: icouldn't really. >> mary sue twohy: wow,yeah that's interesting. yeah. >> billy bragg: but ihave spoke to other people who interviewed him and saidyeah he's always winding people up, so.

i was like, okay. >> billy bragg: heshall remain nameless. it's not fair on him. >> billy bragg: but, yeahi was like, "come on man. don't do this to me." >> billy bragg: oh, yeah. >> stephen winick: so, you'vegot a recent song out as well. >> billy bragg: i do, yeah. i just released a newsong based on the events

of last year called the"the sleep of reason" which is i actuallystarted from an etching by the spanish artist franciscogoya called the "the sleep of reason produces monsters"and it kind of resonated with the events of last yearwhat with brexit and trump's a; you know i started sortof dropping singles now. i've got another one coming outnext month and the month after. it seems to be a practicalway of getting stuff out that has too much[inaudible] than making records.

>> billy bragg: just put thesongs out when they're ready. >> stephen winick: so, isthat what you're doing now? you're doing? >> stephen winick: song-by-song? >> billy bragg: oneof them will come out between now and christmas. and we'll probably compilethem on a cd probably. >> mary sue twohy:when you heard a band at the tonder festivalin 2008, what was going

on when you heard this band? >> billy bragg: i was walkingaround the festival having a, trying to sauce out whatthe audience might be like for my performance whichi usually do when i turn up at a festival, and in themain tent i heard this skiffle band playing. i thought, "blimey. i didn't know they hadskiffles still in denmark." and the main stage iswell-above, it was carolina

and the chocolate drops. and i finally realizedthat, you know, what they were doingis the same intention. i mean, it's notexactly the same sound. i think they're movingtowards to sort of a classic string band sound,but the material and the vibe and the enthusiasm, iyou know, close your eyes and you would listen tothe skifflers really. i was really surprised by it.

>> stephen winick: andthey come straight here to do their research. >> billy bragg: yeah, i bet. >> stephen winick: they've beenin our reading room quite a bit. >> billy bragg: yeah, yeah. yeah and i do a greatjob of it yeah. i do a great job too. >> stephen winick:alright, so what is next in your, in your agenda?

>> billy bragg: well,i'm putting these things out over the next 6 months, soi've got the first 3 written, i've got to write the next 3. and then next year i'm sortof looking at, you know, doing a bit of festivalsover the summer. i've got some veryinteresting opportunities there and the possibility of makinga documentary about skiffle. >> mary sue twohy: ah yes. >> stephen winick: oh.

>> billy bragg: we'llsee if it comes off. >> stephen winick:that would be great. >> billy bragg: i mean,people talk about these things and they don't happen, butit would be a lovely thing to do particularly now,because a lot of the, you know, 60 years ago and a lot of theprotagonists are old now those that are still with us, so itwould be great to get that done and maybe talk tosome of the, you know, people like paul mccarthy.

i did have an interview bookedwith paul, but we couldn't; the two of us couldn'tmake it happen. i never did get aroundto talking to him, but he was willingto talk about it so i might be ableto engage him. wonderful. >> stephen winick: alright,well i would like to thank you for doing this interviewwith us. >> stephen winick: and to thankmary sue also for being part

of it and this hasbeen an interview for the americanfolk life center at the library of congress. thank you billy bragg. >> billy bragg: thank you. >> stephen winick: thankyou mary sue twohy. >> billy bragg: ihad a great time. >> stephen winick:and my name is steve. >> this has been a presentationof the library of congress.

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