Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Roots, Radicals and Rockers
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.billybragg.co.uk/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bragg * http://www.npr.org/2017/07/19/538079082/billy-bragg-on-skiffle-the-movement-that-brought-guitar-to-british-radio
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 20, 1957, in Barking, England; son of Dennis Frederick Austin Bragg and Marie Victoria D’Urso.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Musician and writer. Member of musical groups, including Riff Raff with Wiggy and Spy vs. Spy. Appeared in the film Billy Bragg Goes to Moscow & Norton, Virginia, Too: Which Side Are You On?.
MIILITARY:British Army, recruit, 1981.
AWARDS:Trailblazer Award, American Music Association UK Awards, 2016; Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award, American Music Association US Awards, 2016.
POLITICS: Labour Party.WRITINGS
Also, author of The Progressive Patriot. Author of forewords to books, including Rise Again: A Group Singing Songbook, Hate: My Life in the British Far Right, and Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. Contributor to books, including Woody Guthrie: Art Works.
SIDELIGHTS
Billy Bragg is a British musician and writer, who has been releasing albums since the 1980s. Before launching his solo career, he played with the bands Riff Raff with Wiggy and Spy vs. Spy. Bragg grew up in a small industrial town in England. He failed his college-entrance exams, which limited his career choice. In an interview with Terry Gross, excerpts of which appeared on the National Public Radio website, Bragg explained: “I wasn’t any good at boxing, couldn’t play football, so I thought I might try my hand at writing songs. So the kid next door taught me how to play guitar, and everything since then has been a blur till we just started talking a few minutes ago.” Bragg regularly wrote poetry in his adolescence, so he adapted that skill for songwriting.
Riff Raff with Wiggy was a band Bragg played in with the neighbor who taught him how to play guitar, Philip Wigg. During his early days as a musician, he was inspired by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkle, and the Clash. The latter of these groups inspired Bragg to become involved in politics. He has been a longtime supporter of the Labour Party. After Riff Raff with Wiggy broke up, Bragg was unsure of what to do with his life. He decided to join the British Army. However, he bought himself out after three months of basic training. After leaving the army, Bragg began playing on his own as Spy vs. Spy. Bragg’s intrepid ambition allowed him to secure a record deal. He eventually dropped the Spy vs. Spy moniker and began releasing albums under his own name. Among the albums he has released are Brewing up with Billy Bragg, Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, The Internationale, Don’t Try This at Home, and William Bloke.
Bragg has also become known as a writer. He is the author of the forewords of books, including Rise Again: A Group Singing Songbook, Hate: My Life in the British Far Right, and Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. In 2017, he released the book Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World. In this volume, he discusses the music genre skiffle, which originated in the United Kingdom, and explains its importance in music history. In the same interview with Gross, Bragg stated: “It starts with Lead Belly’s repertoire, really. Lead Belly was probably the greatest folk musician that America produced. He played so many great styles. He was so much more than just a blues man. But what happened was when British kids got hold of that, they also started introducing some of their own folk music, sea shanties [and] calypso music. There was a large migration of people from the Caribbean, from 1948 onwards—they brought guitars with them, and a lot of cowboy songs as well.” Bragg explains that skiffle was humble music and was not focused much on technical prowess. In fact, many skiffle songs feature only three chords. Despite its simplicity, the genre caught on, influencing the work of musicians, including members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. Bragg also makes connections between skiffle and the punk genre, explaining that the two share the same DIY ethos.
David Hepworth, reviewer in the New Statesman, commented: “If there’s a drawback with Bragg’s book it’s that it ought to have come out 20 years ago, when the people who played skiffle, either famously or in an amateur capacity, were still around in numbers. Because it’s 2017, such contemporary phenomena as the Aldermaston marches, the growth of ITV, and the electric effect of Bill Haley’s decorous ‘Rock Around the Clock’ played through big speakers at the cinema, all have to be explained in full to a contemporary readership for whom pleasure denied can mean an app that won’t launch.” However, Spectator critic Max Decharne asserted: “Billy Bragg has a long-standing interest in the genre, and his passion for those early days of frantic strumming and washboard-driven rhythms is clear throughout his eloquent and thoroughly researched book.” Decharne added: “Bragg draws an impressive number of strands together, telling the rich tale of a country still experiencing the final years of postwar rationing.” Decharne continued: “He is particularly good on the various leftwing and occasional communist affiliations of some in the skiffle scene.”
“This is a riveting book, written by a fan who sees the links and mutations between musics,” remarked Louise Gray in the New Internationalist. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described Roots, Radicals, and Rockers as a “superb account.” The same contributor added: “Writing with an expert practitioner’s appreciation for music, Bragg tells the story of British rock-‘n’-roll’s forerunner with verve and great intelligence.” A writer in Publishers Weekly suggested: “Bragg impresses throughout with engaging prose and painstaking research. He further enlivens the text with personal insights and witty asides.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World.
New Internationalist, June, 2017, Louise Gray, review of Roots, Radicals and Rockers, p. 40.
New Statesman, July 14, 2017, David Hepworth, “Fidgety Tunes,” review of Roots, Radicals, and Rockers, p. 43.
Publishers Weekly, April 17, 2017, review of Roots, Radicals, and Rockers, p. 57.
Spectator, June 10, 2017, Max Decharne, “Days of Frantic Strumming,” review of Roots, Radicals, and Rockers, p. 37.
ONLINE
National Public Radio Online, https://www.npr.org/ (July 19, 2017), Terry Gross, interview.
QUOTED: "It starts with Lead Belly's repertoire, really. Lead Belly was probably the greatest folk musician that America produced. He played so many great styles. He was so much more than just a blues man. But what happened was when British kids got hold of that, they also started introducing some of their own folk music, sea shanties [and] calypso music. There was a large migration of people from the Caribbean, from 1948 onwards—they brought guitars with them, and a lot of cowboy songs as well."
"I wasn't any good at boxing, couldn't play football, so I thought I might try my hand at writing songs. So the kid next door taught me how to play guitar, and everything since then has been a blur till we just started talking a few minutes ago."
Billy Bragg On Skiffle, The Movement That Brought Guitar To British Radio
Listen· 42:59
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July 19, 20173:13 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
Terry Gross square 2017
TERRY GROSS
Fresh Air
Billy Bragg says he initially pursued songwriting as a way to escape working in the local car factory.
Andy Whale/Courtesy of Faber & Faber
It's hard to believe, but before the 1950s, guitars were rarely heard in British music. Billy Bragg says the first guitars to hit the British pop scene came as a part of skiffle, a musical movement inspired by African-American roots musicians.
Bragg, who's written a book on skiffle called Roots, Radicals And Rockers, describes the genre as "a bunch of British school boys in the mid-'50s playing Lead Belly's repertoire... on acoustic guitars."
YouTube
One of the most pivotal performances was Lonnie Donegan's 1954 cover of Lead Belly's "Rock Island Line," which Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin later described as a song that changed his life. But Bragg notes that the entire genre was transformative in that it opened the door for The Beatles, Van Morrison and other Brit rock bands that followed.
Hear the full Fresh Air interview, in which Bragg plays some of his favorite songs, at the audio link above, and read on for highlights.
Interview Highlights
On how skiffle took off
It starts with Lead Belly's repertoire, really. Lead Belly was probably the greatest folk musician that America produced. He played so many great styles. He was so much more than just a blues man. But what happened was when British kids got hold of that, they also started introducing some of their own folk music, sea shanties [and] calypso music. There was a large migration of people from the Caribbean, from 1948 onwards — they brought guitars with them, and a lot of cowboy songs as well.
On how British teenagers helped revolutionize the music industry
What happened in 1955, '56, was the first generation of British kids who were born during the war left school, and they left school at a time of high employment, so they were able to find work pretty quickly. So they were getting paid more, sometimes more than their parents, and the only expense they had was giving housekeeping to their mom.
Billy Bragg: Tiny Desk Concert
TINY DESK
Billy Bragg: Tiny Desk Concert
So what we're seeing is these young, working-class people with spending power, and these are people who have grown up in a time of rationing. They've led this kind of terribly restrained childhood and all of a sudden, they're in the metaphorical sweet shop and they're looking for things to define themselves. For young men, what defines them as different from their parents is the guitar, picking up the guitar and playing this roots — predominately African-American roots music. And it defines them as completely different from what their parents are listening to and what's on the radio at the time, because youth culture was mediated by the BBC.
On writing poems in school
Everybody at school writes poems, don't they? That's one of the things they make you do for homework. I just carried on doing it. I don't know why all the other kids in the class — why they didn't carry on doing it, but I just carried on doing it. It turned out to be something that I was pretty good at.
On why he wanted to try to be a songwriter
I realized you're not going to make a living reading poems out, and if I was going to escape working in the car factory — the town I grew up in was dominated by a car factory ... and everybody's dad worked there or worked for one of the ancillary companies like my dad did — so I didn't really want to work there. We went there with the school a couple of times and it just looked like Hades to me, the main body plant.
So when I told them I didn't want to do that ... the career officer literally said to me, "You have three choices, Bragg: the Army, the Navy or the Air Force," and gave me the forms, and that was it, so I thought, "You know, I'm going to have to think of something to get out of this." So I wasn't any good at boxing, couldn't play football, so I thought I might try my hand at writing songs. So the kid next door taught me how to play guitar, and everything since then has been a blur till we just started talking a few minutes ago.
Roots, Radicals and Rockers
Roots, Radicals and Rockers
How Skiffle Changed the World
by Billy Bragg
Hardcover, 431 pages purchase
On why he enlisted in (and later left) the Army
One of the reasons I did it, I think, looking back, is I was trying to get rid of this stupid idea that I could ever be a singer-songwriter and this seemed to be the best way to just smother it, kill it, forget it. Of course, I get to this place, this Army place, and I just start coming up with these great ideas for songs, and I suddenly realize, "Damn, I'm going to have to extricate myself and do this one more time."
That experience of basic training, I hate to say this: I was pretty good at it. When I said I was leaving, they were very disappointed, because I was actually pretty good at it. The whole thing. It kind of gave me a sense that I could do anything. In the end it ended up being like a sabbatical, because I'll be standing in a pub somewhere in South London and there'd be a leery audience and I'd think, "I've taken on the British Army, I can deal with these herberts, what have you got?"
On how he ended up getting a manager and a record deal
I was working with a guy who did video presentations for corporations at a time when people didn't have video, so we would carry a video machine around with us to do these presentations. So I'm in a record company, trying to get to see a guy to give him my [demo] tape and they're not letting me in ... and I'm sitting there, hours going by and nothing's happening and a young lady stuck her head around the door and said, "Are you the guy who's come in to tune in the video?" And without thinking much about it I said, "Yep, that's me!" So they let me in, they let me through the door upstairs into the place, I crawled under the telly, I tuned in their video like they asked me — wasn't a lie, I did it — and then I asked around [for] the guy I was looking for and they said, "Yeah, that's him over there," and I went and gave him my tape, and he ended up being my manager and getting me a record deal.
On something he learned from Woody Guthrie's songwriting
I think Woody — he's said as much in his writing, that he never wanted to write a song that made people feel down. When he wrote his political songs it was always about lifting people up and giving them hope and making them feel a better life was possible. He said he hated songs that made people feel like they were born to lose. So what I learned from that — it's something I've been feeling for a while, but I haven't been able to articulate, and that is the biggest enemy of all of us who want to make the world a better place is not capitalism or conservatism. It's actually cynicism. And not the cynicism of right-wing newspapers or news channels — the cynicism that is our greatest enemy is our own cynicism, our own sense that nothing will ever change, that nobody cares about this stuff, that all politicians are the same.
If we're gonna make a difference, we have to be able to overcome that. We have to be able to identify our cynicism — we all feel it, of course we all feel it — and we have to be able to curb it and put it to one side and go out every day and think the glass is half-full.
Sam Briger and Therese Madden produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Lars Gotrich adapted it for the Web.
Billy Bragg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billy Bragg
Billy Bragg, May 2010 2.jpg
Bragg in 2010
Background information
Birth name Stephen William Bragg
Born 20 December 1957 (age 60)
Barking, Essex, England
Genres Folk punk,[1] folk rock, indie folk, alternative rock, alternative country, Americana
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, musician, author
Instruments Vocals, guitar, bass guitar
Years active 1977–present
Labels Charisma, Go! Discs, Elektra, Cooking Vinyl, Dine Alone Records
Associated acts The Red Stars, The Blokes, Riff-Raff, Wilco, Joe Henry
Website www.billybragg.co.uk
Billy Bragg's voice
MENU0:00
Recorded October 2012 from the BBC Radio 4 programme Mastertapes
Stephen William Bragg (born 20 December 1957) is an English singer, songwriter and left-wing activist.[2][3] His music blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs, with lyrics that mostly span political or romantic themes. His music is heavily centred on bringing about change and involving the younger generation in activist causes.[4]
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Career
3 Politics and activism
3.1 From 1983 to 1997
3.2 Labour in government
3.3 From 2010 to 2015
3.4 Support for Jeremy Corbyn
4 Discography
5 Notes
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
Early life[edit]
Bragg was born in 1957 in Barking, Essex,[5] one of the sons of Dennis Frederick Austin Bragg, an assistant sales manager to a Barking cap maker and milliner, and his wife Marie Victoria D'Urso, who was of Italian descent.[6] Bragg's father died of lung cancer in 1976,[7] and his mother in 2011.[8]
Bragg was educated at Northbury Junior School and Park Modern Secondary School (now part of Barking Abbey Secondary School[9]) in Barking, where he failed his eleven-plus exam, effectively precluding him from going to university.[10] However he developed an interest in poetry at the age of twelve, when his English teacher chose him to read a poem he had written for a homework assignment on a local radio station.[11] He put his energies into learning and practising the guitar with his next-door neighbour, Philip Wigg (Wiggy); some of their influences were the Faces, Small Faces and the Rolling Stones. He was also exposed to folk and folk-rock music during his teenage years, citing Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan as early influences on his songwriting.[11]
Bragg was particularly influenced by the Clash, whom he'd seen play live in London in May 1977 on their White Riot Tour, and again at a Rock Against Racism carnival in April 1978, which he admits was the first time he really stepped into the world of music as it is used for political activism.[4] The experience of the gig and preceding march helped shape Bragg's left-wing politics, having previously "turned a blind eye" to casual racism.[4]
Career[edit]
In 1977 Bragg formed the punk rock/pub rock band Riff Raff with Wiggy. The band decamped to rural Oundle in Northamptonshire in 1978 to record a series of singles (the first on independent Chiswick Records) which did not receive wide exposure. After a period of gigging in Northamptonshire and London, they returned to Barking and split in 1980.[12] Taking a series of odd jobs including working at Guy Norris' record shop in Barking high street. Bragg became disillusioned with his stalled music career and in May 1981 joined the British Army as a recruit destined for the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars of the Royal Armoured Corps. After completing three months' basic training, he bought himself out for £175 and returned home.[13]
Bragg peroxided his hair to mark a new phase in his life and began performing frequent concerts and busking around London, playing solo with an electric guitar under the name Spy Vs. Spy (after the strip in Mad magazine).[14]
Bragg performing at South by Southwest in 2008
His demo tape initially got no response from the record industry, but by pretending to be a television repair man, he got into the office of Charisma Records' A&R man Peter Jenner.[15] Jenner liked the tape, but the company was near bankruptcy and had no budget to sign new artists. Bragg got an offer to record more demos for music publisher Chappell & Co., so Jenner agreed to release them as a record. Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy (credited to Billy Bragg) was released in July 1983 by Charisma's new imprint, Utility. Hearing DJ John Peel mention on-air that he was hungry, Bragg rushed to the BBC with a mushroom biryani, so Peel played a song from Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy albeit at the wrong speed (since the 12" LP was, unconventionally, cut to play at 45rpm). Peel insisted he would have played the song even without the biryani and later played it at the correct speed.[15]
Within months Charisma had been taken over by Virgin Records and Jenner, who had been made redundant, became Bragg's manager. Stiff Records' press officer Andy Macdonald – who was setting up his own record label, Go! Discs – received a copy of Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy. He made Virgin an offer and the album was re-released on Go! Discs in November 1983, at the fixed low price of £2.99.[16] Around this time, Andy Kershaw, an early supporter at Radio Aire in Leeds, was employed by Jenner as Bragg's tour manager. (He later became a BBC DJ and TV presenter, and he and Bragg appeared in an episode of the BBC TV programme Great Journeys in 1989, in which they travelled the Silver Road from Potosí, Bolivia, to the Pacific coast at Arica, Chile.)[17]
Though never released as a Bragg single, album track and live favourite "A New England", with an additional verse, became a Top 10 hit in the UK for Kirsty MacColl in January 1985. Since MacColl's early death, Bragg always sings the extra verse live in her honour.[18]
In 1984, he released Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, a mixture of political songs (e.g. "It Says Here") and songs of unrequited love (e.g. "The Saturday Boy"). This was followed in 1985 by Between the Wars, an EP of political songs that included a cover version of Leon Rosselson's "The World Turned Upside Down". The EP made the Top 20 of the UK Singles Chart and earned Bragg an appearance on Top of the Pops, singing the title track. Bragg later collaborated with Rosselson on the song, "Ballad of a Spycatcher".[19]
In the same year, he embarked on his first tour of North America, with Wiggy as tour manager, supporting Echo & The Bunnymen.[20] The tour began in Washington D.C. and ended in Los Angeles. On the same trip, in New York, Bragg unveiled his "Portastack",[21] a self-contained, mobile PA system weighing 35 lbs (designed for £500 by engineer Kenny Jones), the wearing of which became an archetypal image of the singer at that time. With it, he was able to busk outside the New Music Seminar, a record industry conference.[22]
In 1986 Bragg released Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, which became his first Top 10 album. Its title is taken from a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky and a translated version of the poem was printed on the record's inner sleeve. Back to Basics is a 1987 collection of his first three releases: Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, and Between the Wars. He enjoyed his only Number 1 hit single in May 1988, a cover of the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home", a shared A-side with Wet Wet Wet's "With a Little Help from My Friends". Both were taken from a multi-artist re-recording of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band titled Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father coordinated by the NME in aid of the charity Childline. Wet Wet Wet's cover dominated radio airplay and its video was shown over three consecutive weeks on Top of the Pops; in week four, Bragg went on the programme to play his cover, with regular accompanist Cara Tivey on piano.[23]
Bragg released his fourth album, Workers Playtime, in September 1988. With this album, Bragg added a full backing band and accompaniment, including Tivey on piano, Danny Thompson on double bass and veteran Mickey Waller on drums. Wiggy earned a co-production credit with Joe Boyd.[24]
In May 1990 Bragg released the political mini-LP The Internationale on his and Jenner's own short-lived label Utility, which operated independently of Go! Discs, to which Bragg was still contracted. The songs were, in part, a return to his solo guitar style, but some featured more complicated arrangements and included a brass band. The album paid tribute to one of Bragg's influences with the song, "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night", which is an adapted version of Earl Robinson's song, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", itself an adaptation of a poem by Alfred Hayes.[25] Though the album only reached Number 34 in the UK Charts, Bragg described it as "a reassertion of my rights as an individual ... and a childish two fingers [to Go! Discs boss Andy Macdonald, who'd recently signed a distribution deal with entertainment industry giant PolyGram]."[26]
Performing with The Imagined Village at Camp Bestival, 20 July 2008
His sixth studio album Don't Try This at Home was recorded in the shadow of the build-up to the Gulf War and subsequent ground war, inspiring the track "Rumours of War". Although there is social comment ("The Few", "North Sea Bubble"), it was intended as a more commercial pop album, released in September 1991. (Bragg called it "a very long-range attempt to convert the ball between the posts."[27]). The first single was the upbeat "Sexuality", which, despite an accessible video and a dance remix on the B-side, only reached Number 27 on the UK Singles Chart. Following overtures by rival label Chrysalis, Bragg and Jenner had been persuaded by Go! Discs' Andy and Juliet Macdonald to sign a four-album deal for a million pound advance; in return he would promote the album with singles and videos.[28] A more commercial sound and aggressive marketing had no appreciable effect on album sales, and after a grueling, 13-month world tour with a full band (the Red Stars, led by Wiggy), and a period of forced convalescence after an appendicitis, Bragg left Go! Discs in summer 1992, paying back the remainder of his advance in return for all rights to his back catalogue.[29]
Bragg released the album William Bloke in 1996 after taking time off to help new partner Juliet Wills raise their son Jack. (There is a reference to him in the track "Brickbat": "Now you'll find me with the baby, in the bathroom.")[30] After the ambitious instrumentation of Don't Try This at Home, it was a simpler record, musically, more personal and even spiritual, lyrically (its title a pun on the name of 18th-century English poet William Blake, who is referenced in the song "Upfield").[31]
Around that time, Nora Guthrie (daughter of American folk artist Woody Guthrie) asked Bragg to set some of her father's unrecorded lyrics to music. The result was a collaboration with the band Wilco and Natalie Merchant (with whom Bragg had worked previously). They released the album Mermaid Avenue in 1998,[32] and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II in 2000.[33] The first album was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category. A third batch, Mermaid Avenue Vol III, and The Complete Sessions followed in 2012 to mark Woody Guthrie's centennial.[34] A rift with Wilco over mixing and sequencing the first album led to Bragg recruiting his own band, The Blokes, to promote the album live. The Blokes included keyboardist Ian McLagan, who had been a member of Bragg's boyhood heroes The Faces. The documentary film Man in the Sand depicts the roles of Nora Guthrie, Bragg, and Wilco in the creation of the Mermaid Avenue albums.[35]
A developing interest in English national identity, driven by the rise of the BNP and his own move from London to rural Dorset in 1999, informed his 2002 album England, Half English (whose single, "Take Down The Union Jack" put him back on Top of the Pops in the Queen's Golden Jubilee year[36]) and his 2006 book The Progressive Patriot. The book expressed his view that English socialists can reclaim patriotism from the right wing. He draws on Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling for an inclusive sense of Englishness.[37] In 2007 Bragg moved closer to his English folk music roots by joining the WOMAD-inspired collective The Imagined Village, who recorded an album of updated versions of traditional English songs and dances and toured through that autumn.[38]
In December Bragg previewed tracks from his long-awaited forthcoming album Mr. Love & Justice at a one-off evening of music and conversation to mark his 50th birthday at London's South Bank.[39] The album was released in March 2008, the second Bragg album to be named after a book by Colin MacInnes after England, Half English.[40][41]
The same year, during the NME Awards ceremony, Bragg sang a duet with British solo act Kate Nash. They mixed up two of their greatest hits, Nash playing "Foundations", and Bragg redoing "A New England".[42] Also in 2008, Bragg played a small role in Stuart Bamforth's film A13: Road Movie.[43]
In 2009, Bragg was invited by London's South Bank to write new lyrics for "Ode to Joy", the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (original libretto by Friedrich Schiller), since adopted as an international anthem of unity. The London Philharmonic Orchestra performed it at the Royal Festival Hall in front of the Queen and Bragg met her afterwards to earn "brownie points" with his mother, also in attendance.[44]
He was involved in the play Pressure Drop at the Wellcome Collection in London in April and May 2010. The production, written by Mick Gorden, and billed as "part play, part gig, part installation", featured new songs by Bragg. He performed during the play with his band, and acted as compere.[45]
Bragg was invited by Michael Eavis to curate the Leftfield stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2010,[46] which he has continued to do in subsequent years.[47] He also took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, where he wrote a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible.[48] Bragg performed a set of the Guthrie songs that he had set to music for Mermaid Avenue during the Hay Literary Festival in June 2012,[49] he also performed the same set on the Friday night of the 2012 Cambridge Folk Festival.[50]
On 18 March 2013, Bragg released his latest studio album, five years since Mr. Love & Justice, titled Tooth & Nail. Recorded in five days at the home studio of musician/producer Joe Henry in South Pasadena it featured 11 original songs, including one written for the Bush Theatre and a Woody Guthrie cover. Stylistically, it continued to explore genres of Americana and Alternative country, a natural progression since Mermaid Avenue.[51][52] The album was a commercial success, becoming his best charting record since 1991's Don't Try This at Home.[53]
Bragg with Joe Henry at the Union Chapel, Islington
In February 2014, Bragg started a series of "radio shows" on Spotify, in which he talked listeners through self-curated playlists of "his favourite tracks and artists, and uncovering some little-known musical gems."[54]
On 14 April 2014, Bragg put out Live at the Union Chapel, a souvenir album and DVD of a show he played on 5 June 2013 at the Union Chapel in London, featuring songs from Tooth & Nail as well as favourites from his back catalogue.[55]
In February 2016, Bragg was given the Trailblazer Award at the inaugural Americana Music Association UK Awards in London.[56] Following that, in September he was given the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award at the Americana Music Association US Awards in Nashville.[57]
In August 2016, Bragg released his eleventh album, a collaboration with Joe Henry, Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad, recorded at various points on a journey between Chicago and Los Angeles by train in March. It reached number 28 in the UK Album Charts[58] and number one in the UK Americana album chart.[59]
The pair announced a dual Shine a Light tour, starting at the Americana Music Festival in Nashville in September 2016, and taking them across the States and Canada, the UK and Ireland. In April 2017, they played in Australia .
Faber announced that it would publish Billy's second nonfiction book (after 2013's The Progressive Patriot), Roots, Radicals and Rockers in June, a history of the British skiffle movement, tracing the form from its 1950s boom back to ragtime, blues, jazz and American folk music.
Politics and activism[edit]
For the entirety of Bragg's 30-year-plus recording career he has been involved with grassroots, broadly leftist, political movements, and this is often reflected in his lyrics.[60] He has also recorded and performed cover versions of famous socialist anthems such as "The Internationale" and "The Red Flag". Bragg said in an interview: "I don't mind being labelled a political songwriter. The thing that troubles me is being dismissed as a political songwriter."[61] Bragg has cited the Clash as a strong influence on his politically-themed material and activism:
It wasn't so much their lyrics as what they stood for and the actions they took. That became really important to me. Phil Collins might write a song about the homeless, but if he doesn't have the action to go with it he's just exploiting that for a subject. I got that from the Clash, and I try to remain true to that tradition as best I can.[62]
From 1983 to 1997[edit]
Bragg's politics were focused by the Conservative Party's 144-seat majority landslide at the 1983 general election. He told his biographer, "By 1983, the scales had fallen from my eyes."[63] His record label boss Andy Macdonald observed that "his presence onstage took on more of the avenging angel."[64] Bragg was at the forefront of music's influence on the 1984 miners' strike, and played many benefit gigs in mining towns like Newport and Sunderland.[65] He also released an EP during this year titled "Between the Wars", which connected struggles of class solidarity to the present issue. This single was his most successful up until this point, reaching number 15 on the charts.[66] The following year, after playing a short Labour Party-sponsored Jobs For Youth tour, he joined other like-minded activists in the public eye to form the musicians' alliance Red Wedge, which promoted Labour's cause – and in turn lobbied the party on youth issues – in the run-up to the 1987 general election,[67] with a national tour in 1986 alongside The Style Council, Jerry Dammers and The Communards.
Bragg travelled twice to the Soviet Union in 1986, the year Mikhail Gorbachev started to promote the policies of perestroika and glasnost. He played a gig in Leningrad, and the Festival of Song in the Struggle for Peace in Kiev.[68]
On TV series After Dark in 1987
On 12 June 1987, the night after Labour lost that year's general election, Bragg appeared on a notable edition of the Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark, alongside David Selbourne, Teresa Gorman and Hilary Hook among others.
Labour in government[edit]
In 1999, he was invited to appear before a commission that debated possible reform of the House of Lords,[69] at which he put forward what became known as "the Bragg Method": the arrangement of the Upper House to proportionally reflect the results of a general election. "Trying to make it sexy is impossible," he said.[70]
During the 2001 UK general election, Bragg promoted tactical voting in an attempt to unseat Conservative Party candidates in his adopted home county Dorset, particularly in South Dorset and West Dorset.[71] The Conservatives did indeed narrowly lose South Dorset to the Labour Party.
Bragg supports both Scottish and Welsh independence.[72] In 2014, he praised musician David Bowie for speaking out in favour of Scotland remaining part of the UK: "Bowie's intervention encourages people in England to discuss the issues of the independence referendum, and I think English people should be discussing it, so I welcome his intervention."[73]
Supporting a demonstration against police misuse of anti-terrorism legislation; Trafalgar Square, London, 23 January 2010
Bragg has been an opponent of fascism, racism,[4] bigotry, sexism and homophobia, and is a supporter of a multi-racial Britain. As a result, he has conflicted with far-right groups such as the British National Party (BNP). In a 2004 The Guardian article, Bragg was quoted as saying:
The British National Party would probably make it into a parliament elected by proportional representation, too. It would shine a torch into the dirty little corner where the BNP defecate on our democracy, and that would be much more powerful than duffing them up in the street – which I'm also in favour of.[74]
During the 2005 general election campaign in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency, Bragg supported Oona King, the Labour Party's pro-Iraq war candidate, over George Galloway, the left-wing socialist anti-war candidate from the Respect Party, due to a belief that splitting the left-wing vote would allow the Conservatives to win the seat.[75] Galloway overturned King's 10,000-strong majority to become his party's only MP.[76]
Bragg announced the foundation of the organisation Jail Guitar Doors (taking its name from the song by the Clash), on the fifth anniversary of Joe Strummer's death at the NME Awards in 2007. It's aim is to supply instruments to prison to encourage prisoners to address problems in a non-confrontational way.[77] An American chapter of the organisation was launched in 2009 by MC5's Wayne Kramer.[78]
In January 2010, Bragg announced that he would withhold his income tax as a protest against the Royal Bank of Scotland's plan to pay bonuses of approximately of £1,500,000,000 to staff in its investment banking business. Bragg set up a Facebook group, made appearances on radio and television news programmes, and made a speech at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park saying, "Millions are already facing stark choices: are they willing to work longer hours for less money, or would they rather be unemployed? I don’t see why the bankers at RBS shouldn’t be asked the same."[79]
From 2010 to 2015[edit]
On the eve of the 2010 general election, Bragg announced that he would be voting for the Liberal Democrats because "they've got the best manifesto".[80]
Bragg was also very active in his hometown of Barking as part of Searchlight magazine's Hope not Hate campaign, where the BNP's leader Nick Griffin was standing for election. At one point during the campaign Bragg squared up to BNP London Assembly Member Richard Barnbrook, calling him a "Fascist racist" and saying "when you're gone from this borough, we will rebuild this community". The BNP came third on election day.[81]
Bragg is a regular at the Tolpuddle Martyrs festival, an annual event celebrating the memory of those transported to Australia for founding a union in the 1830s.[82]
In January 2011, news sources reported that 20 to 30 residents of Bragg's Dorset hometown, Burton Bradstock, had received anonymous letters viciously attacking him and his politics, and urging residents to oppose him in the village. He claimed that a BNP supporter was behind the letters, which argued that Bragg is a hypocrite for advocating socialism while living a wealthy lifestyle, and referred to him as anti-British and pro-immigration.[83]
In July 2011 Bragg joined the growing protests over the News of the World phone hacking affair with the release of his "Never Buy the Sun" single, which references many of the scandal's key points including the Milly Dowler case, police bribes and associated political fallout. It also draws on the 22-year Liverpool boycott of The Sun for their coverage of the Hillsborough Disaster.[84]
In 2011, Bragg joined the Occupy Movement protests.[85]
In 2013, he urged people not to celebrate the death of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but was scathing of her legacy. Bragg was quoted:
The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing... of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society. Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate – organise![86]
In 2014, Bragg joined the March in March anti-government protests[87] in Sydney, Australia.
In June 2014, Bragg joined other musicians (including Radiohead's Ed O'Brien) in backing a call for the EU to intervene in a dispute between YouTube and independent labels. According to a BBC News report, the video-streaming site was offering "non-negotiable contracts" to its planned, Spotify-like music-subscription service to labels such as XL Recordings, 4AD, Cooking Vinyl and Domino "accompanied by the threat that music videos they have posted to their YouTube channels will be blocked from site altogether if they do not agree to the terms."[88]
Bragg was a vocal supporter of Scottish independence during the campaign prior to the referendum on 18 September 2014. Bragg wrote an article for the Guardian publication on 16 September, in which he addressed the objections he had previously received from people who conflated Scottish nationalism with the far-right ethos of the BNP. He described the independence campaign as "civic nationalism" and his opinion piece concluded:
Support for Scottish self-determination might not fit neatly into any leftwing pigeonhole, but it does chime with an older progressive tradition that runs deep in English history – a dogged determination to hold the over-mighty to account. If, during the constitutional settlement that will follow the referendum, we in England can rediscover our Roundhead tradition, we might yet counter our historic weakness for ethnic nationalism with an outpouring of civic engagement that creates a fairer society for all.[89]
Bragg was one of several celebrities who endorsed the parliamentary candidacy of the Green Party's Caroline Lucas at the 2015 general election.[90]
Support for Jeremy Corbyn[edit]
Bragg supports the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.[91] In August 2015, Bragg endorsed Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. He said: "His [Corbyn's] success so far shows you how bland our politics have become, in the aim of winning those swing voters in middle England the Labour Party has lost touch with its roots. We live in a time of austerity and what you want from that is not more austerity, you want compassion."[92] On an edition of Question Time in October 2015, he said that Corbyn represents a political "urge for change" and that Ed Miliband had failed to win the 2015 general election because Miliband and the party followed "the old way of doing things".[93] In 2016, Bragg along with numerous other celebrities, toured the UK to support Corbyn's bid to become Prime Minister.[94][95]
In August 2016, The Times reported that at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Bragg had said: "I worry about Jeremy that he's a kind of twentieth century Labour man", and that "we need to be reaching out to people". Described as a "previously loyal supporter", who has "lent his support to Mr. Corbyn on numerous occasions since he became Labour leader", The Times quoted Bragg: "I don't have a simple answer. My hope is that the party does not split and that we resolve this stalemate". Corbyn at the time was campaigning in an enforced second leadership election in the summer of 2016.[96]
After The Times article appeared, the singer tweeted that he had "joined the long list of people stitched up by the Murdoch papers"[97] and accused the Times of "twisting my words to attack Corbyn", urging "don’t let Murdoch sow discord".[98] The Guardian reproduced a quote from a recording of the event absent from The Times article: "It's a challenge. Labour has fires to fight on different fronts. This would be happening even without Corbyn if any of the other candidates had won last year, these problems would still be there".[97] In August 2016, Bragg also endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.[99]
During the general election campaign in May 2017, Bragg added his signature to a letter published in The Guardian calling for Labour to withdraw its candidates in two constituencies; Brighton Pavilion and the Isle of Wight and potentially allowing the Green Party to defeat the Tories in both, where Labour were running second.[100] The letter was also signed by Labour MP Clive Lewis, former policy chief Jon Cruddas, former shadow children's minister Tulip Siddiq and journalists Paul Mason and Owen Jones. The initiative was "shut down" by Jeremy Corbyn.
Discography[edit]
Main article: Billy Bragg discography
Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy (1983)
Brewing Up with Billy Bragg (1984)
Talking with the Taxman about Poetry (1986)
Workers Playtime (1988)
The Internationale (1990)
Don't Try This at Home (1991)
William Bloke (1996)
England, Half English (2002) (with the Blokes)
Mr Love & Justice (2008)
Tooth & Nail (2013)
QUOTED: "If there's a drawback with Bragg's book it's that it ought to have come out 20 years
ago, when the people who played skiffle, either famously or in an amateur capacity, were still around in numbers. Because it's 2017, such contemporary phenomena as the Aldermaston marches, the growth of ITV, and the electric effect of Bill Haley's decorous "Rock Around the Clock" played through big speakers at the cinema, all have to be explained in full to a contemporary readership for whom pleasure denied can mean an app that won't launch."
Fidgety tunes
David Hepworth
New Statesman.
146.5375 (July 14, 2017): p43.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World
Billy Bragg
Faber & Faber, 431pp. 20 [pounds sterling]
Skiffle is an American expression which, between the wars, meant "rent party". It means little to most
Americans today. To Britons, particularly those who were young in the 1950s, it came to denote that fidgety
form of music, which served as a bridge between the weighty folk-blues of singers such as Leadbelly and
the lurid new rock'n'roll as practised by Elvis Presley. Skiffle was popular because it required little
technique and could be played on cheap acoustic guitars and even items of old household equipment.
The golden generation of British rockers all started out in skiffle groups. It was their gateway to what came
after rock'n'roll. Paul first clapped eyes on John when he was leading his skiffle group the Quarrymen at a
church fete in the summer of 1957.
It helped that skiffle's leading light, Lonnie Donegan, was British but had found a convincing way of
playing American. As Van Morrison, who was in his own skiffle group, the Sputniks, while at school in
Belfast, recalls, "People trying to copy Elvis had no chance ... but Donegan made it possible to go through
that door." This book is a history of the music that made it acceptable for English musicians to sing in an
American accent. Interesting that it should be written by Billy Bragg, one of the few British musicians who
stubbornly sings in his own tongue.
The skiffle boom, which occupied the latter half of the 1950s, came about, as is explained in his readable
account of its brief golden age, by accident. Donegan, whose name was Tony but who had adopted Lonnie
in tribute to the American guitarist Lonnie Johnson, was supposed to supply light relief in the middle of his
employer's traditional jazz set. Inevitably his material became more popular than the allegedly serious stuff,
particularly with the kids who wanted something you could dance to. When the band leader tried to throw
him out, Lonnie was off to the races with the cries of his jazz scene detractors overwhelmed by the sound of
ringing cash registers. Not overly lovable to begin with, Donegan further offended the purists by eventually
swapping traditional American work songs for TV-friendly fare such as "My Old Man's a Dustman".
Throughout this period, the letters pages of the Melody Maker reverberated with passionate disputes about
authenticity. As Bragg's account makes clear, it's easy to shoot holes in such arguments. Donegan's big hit
"Rock Island Line" claimed the railway was close to New Orleans. Not only was it actually hundreds of
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miles to the north, the song was composed by the winners of a talent competition run by the railroad's
owners and organised by some turn-of-the-century Simon Cowell.
'Twas ever thus. Tug on any thread in the most complicated musical tapestry and you always find somebody
trying to make rent. Music is music. There isn't one sort that's more real than any other. But skiffle sounded
authentic and the bands dressed like artisans, so there were the inevitable arguments about who had sold out
and who hadn't.
Bragg's broad canvas, which encompasses everything from the birth of jazz in New Orleans to the mass
trespass movement in the Peak District in the 1930s, is peopled with great characters and crammed with
vignettes of bracingly different times: Londoner Ken Colyer, who signed on as second cook on a freighter
just to get to New Orleans before the last jazz pioneers died; teenager Shirley Collins, who would sell the
Daily Worker on Saturdays and then don her home-made finery and go onto Hastings pier at night looking
for a man fit to throw her over his shoulder; the PR man John Kennedy, who got Tommy Steele in the
papers by staging a party full of fake debs and pretending that Steele was the toffs' chosen rock'n'roll star;
visiting American Peggy Seeger, who rode a scooter from London to Scotland with no helmet on and a
banjo at her back while barely out of her teens; and, inevitably, any number of glowering moralists, from
Victorian folklorist Hubert Parry to the communist Ewan MacColl, who fancied that they could tell people
what was real music and what wasn't.
Most history from the rock'n'roll age, like most Second World War history, is now written by people who
weren't there at the time. If there's a drawback with Bragg's book it's that it ought to have come out 20 years
ago, when the people who played skiffle, either famously or in an amateur capacity, were still around in
numbers. Because it's 2017, such contemporary phenomena as the Aldermaston marches, the growth of ITV,
and the electric effect of Bill Haley's decorous "Rock Around the Clock" played through big speakers at the
cinema, all have to be explained in full to a contemporary readership for whom pleasure denied can mean
an app that won't launch.
The subject of skiffle can't have been the easiest sell to a publisher in 2017. This may account for the slight
over-statement in the title Roots, Radicals and Rockers, and the regular recourse to comparisons with punk
rock. Punk, being a mere 40 years old, is presumed to be comparatively pin sharp in the memory. This book
made me wonder whether, for all the fuss it makes about itself, punk rock was actually as consequential as
skiffle was.
David Hepworth's most recent book is "Uncommon People: the Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars" (Bantam
Press)
Caption: Rock's radical roots? Gorton Skiffle Group performing in 1957
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hepworth, David. "Fidgety tunes." New Statesman, 14 July 2017, p. 43. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500500749/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dc6a1837.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500500749
QUOTED: "Billy Bragg has a long-standing interest in the genre, and his passion for those early days of frantic strumming and washboard-driven rhythms is clear throughout his eloquent and thoroughly researched book."
"Bragg draws an impressive number of strands together, telling the rich tale of a country still experiencing the final years of postwar rationing."
"He is particularly good on the various leftwing and occasional communist affiliations of some in the skiffle scene."
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Days of frantic strumming
Max Decharne
Spectator.
334.9850 (June 10, 2017): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World
by Billy Bragg
Faber, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 448
'It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it,' sang the Desperate Bicycles on their self-funded debut single in
1977, summing up the punk belief that you didn't have to be the world's best musician before getting up on
stage or making a record. Twenty years earlier, a previous generation learned a similar message from the
skiffle explosion, which put guitars in the hands of many future members of the key British rock groups of
the Sixties. It therefore seems appropriate that a musician first inspired by seeing The Clash has eventually
written a book about skiffle.
Billy Bragg has a long-standing interest in the genre, and his passion for those early days of frantic
strumming and washboard-driven rhythms is clear throughout his eloquent and thoroughly researched book.
A hybrid musical form, skiffle had its roots in the jazz which developed in the wide-open Storyville district
of New Orleans, but it also contained elements drawn from the blues, the protest songs of Woody Guthrie,
prewar hillbilly tunes, prison work songs and the folk music of the British Isles and of Ireland.
Lonnie Donegan, the undisputed king of the movement, found his big opportunity while playing as a
sideman with Chris Barber in Ken Colyer's Jazzmen, stepping into the spotlight as part of a stripped-down
'breakdown group' at their shows, performing what was billed as a 'skiffle' session during intervals.
As for the word itself, Bragg quotes Paul Oliver's landmark 1969 work, The Story of the Blues, to the effect
that 'skiffle' was a 1920s term for those impromptu gatherings more commonly known as rent parties.
However, other jazz scholars have credited Emile 'Stalebread' Lacoume's pioneering 1890s New Orleans
street combo the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band as a skiffle group, and a 1936 interview with Lacoume
highlighted their defiantly makeshift instrumentation, foreshadowing that of some 1950s skiffle bands,
'turning a half beer keg into a bass fiddle, a cigar box into a violin, a soap box into a guitar'. Here was the
DIY spirit in its purest form. Reaching further back, a 1873 dictionary of Somerset slang published in
London defined 'skiffle' as 'to make a mess of any business', and 'skiffling' as 'the act of whittling a stick'.
Bragg draws an impressive number of strands together, telling the rich tale of a country still experiencing
the final years of postwar rationing, in which teenagers began to assert themselves and develop their own
interests--a world of trad jazz, dance halls, CND marches, coffee bars and the first stirrings of the American
rock'n'roll movement which eventually swept all before it. As might be expected from a man who has often
written and sung about politics as well as matters of the heart, he is particularly good on the various leftwing
and occasional communist affiliations of some in the skiffle scene. However, it has to be said that
these tended not to be the people who went on to have the hits.
Although skiffle arose out of the British jazz world of the early 1950s, where the sound had been largely
based around the ensemble playing of wind instruments, it eventually brought the previously overlooked
guitar forward and placed it centre stage. Most musicians who joined skiffle groups and went on to fame
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didn't grab a trumpet and form a trad band; they picked up a guitar, learnt three chords, and started a rocking
combo. Significantly, when John Lennon's skiffle outfit The Quarrymen made their July 1958 demo disc, it
was Buddy Holly they covered, not Lead Belly. The more acoustic slant of early skiffle musicians had
mostly a practical origin, since solid-bodied electric guitars were all but unobtainable in the UK. (Hank
Marvin owned the first Fender Stratocaster in the country, which Cliff Richard bought for him on a trip to
New York at the late date of 1959.)
Despite Bragg's usually excellent research, 'Peggy Sue' can't be described as Buddy Holly's debut single
(that was the excellent 'Blue Days, Black Nights', which appeared 18 months earlier, and there was the
worldwide hit 'That'll Be the Day' in between, credited to The Crickets, a record company ploy which
fooled no one). Similarly, the phrase 'Teddy Boy' was not coined by a 1954 Daily Sketch headline writer,
but passed into the language following a murder trial report in the Daily Express in September 1953, which
said of the drape-suited teenage gang concerned, 'They became "The Edwardians" or--as their girlfriends
preferred it--the "Teddy Boys"'.
As for the political inspiration or otherwise of most early skifflers, it's more likely to have been similar to
that in the punk days, summed up by Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, who told the NME in
1977, 'We're only in it for the beer and the birds after the show'. Which, after all, is probably not too far
from the original impulse of many Storyville musicians a little over a century ago in New Orleans.
Caption: Putting the guitar centre stage: skiffle king Lonnie Donegan in 1962
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Decharne, Max. "Days of frantic strumming." Spectator, 10 June 2017, p. 37. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498478589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0f525a83.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498478589
QUOTED: "This is a riveting book, written by a fan who sees the links and mutations between musics."
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Roots, Radicals and Rockers
Louise Gray
New Internationalist.
.503 (June 2017): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
Full Text:
Roots, Radicals and Rockers
by Billy Bragg (Faber & Faber, ISBN 9580571327768, hardback and ebook)
As a musician, Billy Bragg has done much fine work as a sonic archaeologist; now he adds the book to his
meticulous methodology. Skiffle was a popular music genre that started in 1920s US--a hybrid of US blues
and folk, with a bit of jazz thrown in. Cue its relocation to post-War Britain, and skiffle was an energiser
that changed the world--at least, that's Bragg's thesis. How does it hold up?
Actually, remarkably well, as Bragg presents it as a music that linked old worlds to help define a fastchanging
post-War reality. He has written not only a musical history but a cultural one too, in which New
Orleans jazz purists meet nascent rock'n rollers, where grassroots social movements --from reactionary
teddy boys to the stirrings of student radicals--rub together. It takes in the post-1945 phenomenon of the
'teenager'; and the violent beginnings of a multicultural Britain.
This is a riveting book, written by a fan who sees the links and mutations between musics. The litany of
musicians who pass through includes: Lead Belly, Lonnie Donegan, the soon-to-be Beatles, Led Zeppelin,
the Rolling Stones. Bragg has a great turn of phrase: not many books can open with a definition of 'dead
ground', a term he first came across as a young trainee tank driver, during his short-lived army career, to
describe what is hidden in plain view. Bragg's acute vision helps him paint a vivid history.
**** LG
faber.co.uk
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gray, Louise. "Roots, Radicals and Rockers." New Internationalist, June 2017, p. 40. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495721419/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f0b596de.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495721419
QUOTED: "superb account."
"Writing with an expert practitioner's appreciation for music, Bragg tells the story of British rock-'n'-roll's forerunner with verve and great intelligence."
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Bragg , Billy: ROOTS, RADICALS AND
ROCKERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bragg , Billy ROOTS, RADICALS AND ROCKERS Faber & Faber (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 7, 11
ISBN: 978-0-571-32774-4
Superb account, by British folk-punker Bragg (A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics, 2016, etc.), of the politically
aware, working-class skiffle craze of the 1950s.The so-called British Invasion of the 1960s was a
repurposing of American music, a mix of blues, jazz, and country, that young people on the other side of the
pond were hearing over American Armed Forces Radio and on records brought by Yankee ships. Yet there
was a forgotten intermediary: skiffle. Born of old-school British takes on jazz, it added a rebellious racket,
with a strong rhythm section built on bass, drums, and often washboard; throw thunderous guitars into the
mix in the place of trombones and clarinets, and you have a homegrown recasting of an alien art form, one
populated by unsung heroes and forgotten moments. Bragg finds skiffle on what he calls the "dead ground
of British pop culture," and he aims to sing of those heroes and to recall their glories--and glories they were,
marking a movement that anticipated punk in its insistence on DIY performances hampered largely by a
lack of outlets for recorded music. The author traces skiffle to the early '50s, giving pride of place to Lonnie
Donegan, a player whose recording of the old Lead Belly song "Rock Island Line"--covered at about the
same time by Elvis Presley in the U.S.--was a kind of declaration of skiffle's intent. It took some time for
the moment to get going; as Bragg writes, "David Whitfield and Mantovani could sleep soundly in their
beds," at least for a little while, until skiffle overwhelmed their easy-listening ways. But when it did, there
was little to stop the likes of Alexis Korner and the Ghouls from raising a ruckus--and after them not just
the Beatles, famously founded on skiffle, but also the Rolling Stones, whose founders cut their teeth on the
skiffle sound. Writing with an expert practitioner's appreciation for music, Bragg tells the story of British
rock-'n'-roll's forerunner with verve and great intelligence.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bragg , Billy: ROOTS, RADICALS AND ROCKERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934151/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1346c6bc.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934151
QUOTED: "Bragg impresses throughout with engaging prose and painstaking research. He further enlivens the text with personal insights and witty asides."
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Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle
Changed the World
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p57+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World
Billy Bragg. Faber & Faber, $29.95 (464p) ISBN 978-0-571-32774-4
In his first book, musician, left-wing activist, and sonic archivist Bragg has crafted a remarkable history of
skiffle, a particularly British music genre. Initiated by amateur players obsessed with the blues, jazz, and
folk, skiffle lured teenagers obsessed with all things American and eager to dance away post-WWII
conformity and deprivation. With a DIY ethos and three-chord tunes, skiffle inspired a generation of British
lads to pick up guitars, including among them Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, and a young
extraterrestrial who would later take the name "David Bowie." Roughly a cross between folk and R&B,
skiffle quickly succumbed to the other two genres and faded from the charts, even as its former disciples led
the British Invasion. Bragg impresses throughout with engaging prose and painstaking research. He further
enlivens the text with personal insights and witty asides that give the material a unique cast few professional
writers would dare. The introduction of dozens of new figures in the last third of the book diffuses the
narrative but that's a minor demerit to an accomplished work. Ending with a flourish, Bragg convincingly
argues for the emotional connection between skiffle and punk rock, something Bragg would know about
better than most. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 57+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820821/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0433ace0. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820821