To look at Lonnie Donegan today, in pictures taken 40 years ago when he was topping the British charts and hitting the Top Ten in America, dressed in a suit, his hair cut short and strumming an acoustic guitar, he looks like a musical non-entity. But in 1954, before anyone (especially anybody in England) knew what rock & roll was, Donegan was cool, and his music was hot. He's relatively little remembered outside of England, but Donegan shares an important professional attribute with Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Sex Pistols -- he invented a style of music, skiffle, that completely altered the pop culture landscape and the youth around him, and for a time, completely ruled popular music through that new form. What's more, his music, like that of Presley and Haley, was vital to the early musical careers and future histories of the Beatles, the Stones, and hundreds of other groups. And he did it in 1954, before Elvis was known anywhere outside of Memphis and before Bill Haley was perceived as anything but a Western swing novelty act. nAnthony James Donegan was born in Glasgow, Scotland on April 29, 1931, the son of a classical violinist who had played with the Scottish National Orchestra. Donegan received no encouragement to play an instrument or choose music as a profession, for his father, like many talented musicians during the economic slump of the '30s, was continually out of work. The family, which moved to East London in 1933, had no desire to see him go into a dead-end profession. He first became interested in the guitar at age nine, but it was to be another five years before he took matters into his own hands and bought his first guitar for £12.50 (about $70 American in those days). nDonegan mostly listened to swing and vocal acts such as Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, the Ink Spots, and the Andrews Sisters during the early '40s, although he also heard some Indian music on the BBC, and African songs as transliterated for movies. His taste in jazz went toward Louis Armstrong and Gene Krupa. It was country & western and blues records, especially those by Frank Crumit and Josh White, that really attracted Donegan's interests. It was through BBC broadcasts around 1946 that Donegan first started learning to play songs like "Frankie and Johnny," "Putting on the Style," and "House of the Rising Sun." Before long, he was working backwards from Josh White to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, and Leadbelly, among others, and by the end of the '40s, Donegan was as literate in American blues as anyone born in England. He began playing guitar around London, and going to the small jazz clubs springing up around the city. nHe was coaxed into his first band one night when someone approached him on the train, saying that they'd heard he was a good banjo player, and invited him to audition for a new group. The man extending the invitation was Chris Barber, himself an aspiring young jazzman. Donegan had never even year's wage in England to people of Donegan's generation. Donegan proved to be a popular performer in America, playing on bills with Chuck Berry, among others. He might've continued touring the United States but for the fact he got lonely (his wife and newborn child were brought over), and that "Lost John" had reached number two in England. After his return, he formed a band of his own, which initially consisted of jazz guitarist Denny Wright, Micky Ashman on bass, and Nick Nichols on drums. Wright, a jazz player devoted to Django Reinhardt, proved to be one of the best blues axemen in England at the time, while Ashman and Nichols made up an exceptionally tight rhythm section. Donegan cut his first album, Showcase, in the summer of 1956, featuring songs by bluesmen Leadbelly and Leroy Carr, not to mention moody traditional blues like "I'm a Ramblin' Man" and A.P. Carter's "Wabash Cannonball." The record was a hit, racking up sales in the hundreds of thousands. nIn concert, the group's sound was fuller still, with Donegan and Wright sharing guitar chores with bearded, bespectacled Dick Bishop, who had played on Donegan's earliest records. Still later, Jimmy Currie, a veteran of Tony Crombie's Rockets (the first home-grown rock & roll band in England, patterned loosely after Bill Haley's Comets) became Donegan's lead guitarist in what is regarded as his strongest band. Currie was not only more folk oriented than Wright, but also wrote songs, although Wright would turn up on Donegan sessions as late as 1965. Donegan and his band essentially played live in the studio (there was virtually no overdubbing in those days), but the best record of their sound comes from a concert recorded at London's Conway Hall on January 25, 1957, which was later released by Pye. Another compelling glimpse of the group can be found in the British jukebox movie The Six-Five Special (1957), based on the popular television series of the period, in which Donegan rips through a killer live rendition of "Jack 'O Diamonds," as well as a fine cover of Woody Guthrie's "The Grand Coulee Dam." nWhile Donegan was racking up hits -- "Bring a Little Water, Sylvie" (number seven), "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O" (number four), "Cumberland Gap (number six), and "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the Bedpost Overnight?" (number three and number five in the U.S.) all in less than three years -- thousands of skiffle groups were springing up all over England. New artists, most notably Tommy Steele and, later, Cliff Richard, started out playing skiffle music and put their own stamp on the material before moving on to other sounds. Among the many tens of thousands of British teens he inspired were members of the Beatles, Gerry & the Pacemakers, and the Searchers. By mid-1958, however, skiffle was waning rapidly as a commercial sound, but Donegan continued to appear on the charts right into 1962. Only when the next wave of young rockers came along, who, like Donegan, had their own ideas about music and what they wanted to do with it, did he finally fade from the charts. nHe continued to record sporadically during the '60s, including some sessions at Hickory Records in Nashville with Charlie McCoy, Floyd Cramer, and the Jordanaires, but after 1964, he was primarily occupied as a producer for most of the decade at Pye Records. Among those he worked with during this period was future Moody Blues guitarist-singer Justin Hayward. Donegan's attempt at a recording comeback late in the '60s was unsuccessful, but in 1974, a new boomlet for skiffle music in Germany brought him on tour and into the studio anew, and the following year he and Chris Barber toured together and recorded a new long-player, The Great Re-Union Album. In 1976, however, after another series of shows and recordings in Germany, Donegan suffered a heart attack that left him sidelined, and he moved to California to recuperate. nIn 1978, however, he was back in the studio, recording the album that was his first chart entry in 15 years, Putting on the Style, an all-star skiffle-style album that teamed Donegan with Ringo Starr, Elton John, Brian May, Peter Banks, and other stars and superstars of rock who owed their entry into music to "Rock Island Line." A follow-up album featuring Albert Lee presented Donegan working in a somewhat less familiar country & western vein. By 1980, he was making regular concert appearances again, and a new album with Barber followed. In 1983 Donegan toured England with Billy Joe Spears, and in 1984, he made his theatrical debut in a revival of the 1920 musical Mr. Cinders. More concert tours followed, along with a move from Florida to Spain. Heart surgery in 1992 slowed Donegan down again, but by the end of the year he was touring once again with Chris Barber. nLonnie Donegan remains a beloved pioneer of English rock & roll, and the king of skiffle. In the late '90s, his musical credibility came around again to perhaps the highest level of respect of his life, with several multi-disc hits and career-wide compilations available. Donegan passed away November 3, 2002, following heart problems. Unlike a lot of American rock & roll of the mid-'50s, and even more British attempts at the music from the same period and after, Donegan's music remains eminently enjoyable and enlivening. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide