I got this just a week or two after I first saw Lonnie in Belfast with Van Morrison. It was a bargain — maybe not as ridiculously cheap as it is now, but still a bargain.
The more I play it, the more I like it. The Boy got it immediately, putting down his bedtime bottle of milk to clap along to Jack O'Diamonds. To ears that grew up in the seventies, though, skiffle always sounded so 'thin'. I only got it much later, after that Belfast show.
The accepted version of Donegan's career is that he lost the plot somewhere in the middle, and I guess songs like Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Over Night)? and My Old Man's a Dustman are examples of that. Yet Hank and and Woody all did novelty joke songs, too, and they got away with it, reputations more or less untarnished. I don't have much an overview of Donegan's work beyond a couple of discs like this one and his collaborations (1, 2), but these suggest the good stuff outweighs the naff several times over.
I think of Lonnie Donegan, the way he re-imported that mix of Appalachian and Afro-American music into the UK, where it burgeoned and became an 'invasion' back into the States, as a kind of funnel point in the evolution of all popular music since then. Like the migration of the human race out of Africa, where the first of the two possible exits turned out to be a dead end; if the second one had been too, that would have been Good-bye Homo Sapiens. But 85,000 years ago, a group crossed the mouth of the Red Sea, and then spread out along the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. All non-African people are descended from this group, like all non-jazz beat combos are descended from the group that Donegan led. Oh yeah, or that Elvis bloke, and Little Richard, and a few others, I suppose.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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