Music Arcades: Lonnie Donegan: Muleskinner Blues

I saw Lonnie play under a summer night sky at the Sidmouth Folk Festival, the year before he died and a couple of years after this, his last studio album, had come out. I bought the CD midway between that night and Lonnie's death from his umpteenth heart attack. I record this detail, because I want you to know that I wasn't Celebrating the Dead Artist. I can't bear the way the media's cyclopean attention is driven by death, like the Facebook friend of mine who recently updated his status to the effect "Patrick Swayze's dead, think I'll watch Ghost tonight." Why? And I don't just mean, why not City of Joy? Why not celebrate and enjoy the work of musicians, actors and suchlike while they're still around to appreciate it?

Anyway… Lonnie was still on great form in 2001, and profuse in his thank to Van Morrison for helping to rehabilitate his career via their collaboration. Lonnie has Van guesting on studio versions of a couple of tracks from that collaboration, released here after their live performance together but before the album of that performance came out.

I played this in car a couple of days ago, as Lucy and I had a day out in Lewes. So I had a stab at explaining why he's important; a touch of Citizen Kane Syndrome. The transatlantic to-and-fro whereby Donegan brought Leadbelly and Muddy Waters to the attention of The Beatles and The Stones, for them to reintroduce reintroduce them back to the States in the implausibly-named British Invasion. I told the story, which may be apocryphal, of Billy Bragg receiving a call from John Peel to say he was going to be meeting Lonnie a few days or weeks later, and would Billy mind coming along? Billy couldn't see why his attendance was important and failed to commit. But Peel continued to pester him. When the meeting took place, Billy found John Peel all-a-tremble, barely able to speak at the prospect of talking to Lonnie. Such was the awe in which the worldweary DJ held the singer of My Old Man's a Dustman. I can't find any trace of this meeting on the web, and it may be an invention or elaboration of the truth, but if so, it's not original to me.

When Muleskinner Blues starts with the title track, you get the feeling you're in for something special, a late (re)flowering of the kind that's become almost standard recently for sexagenarians and septuagenarians. (As per standard, the cover photos have Lonnie looking moody and enigmatic where he used to be always smiling.) But by Track Three, a lame reprise of Rock Island Line the signs are not so good. Maybe the material has been chosen to represent a kind of retrospective and summation of Lonnie's career, the details of which I don't pretend to be familiar with. But for me, as a self-standing album, it only half works.