Lonnie Donegan and The All New Electric Muse
The All New Electric Muse is a 3 CD box set, part of a long line of Electric Muse CDs that looks at the history of folk rock in this country. As well as such groups as , and , the box set includes tracks from , and that little known folk rocker .
Most of us involved in the Folk Revival of the sixties and seventies began our musical lives in groups: Tony Rose, Nic Jones, Martin Carthy, Roy Bailey, Ian Campbell - the list goes on.
Without Lonnie there would probably have been no Beatles or Stones and certainly a very different folk revival. I met the man in London a few years back and had a great afternoon listening to him yarning about his life and times. Shortly before he died I wrote the following poem. Allow me to indulge myself by printing it here - it's not very often I have a captive audience
All Pig Iron (in memoriam Lonnie Donegan)
How many boys in cold front-rooms
Their fingers, crippled spiders, stumbling on
Steel strings, brass fretwire, fumbled for three chords:
E, A, B7, scribbling down the words
On Basildon Bond -
I got sheep, I got cows,
I got horses, I got pigs?
'Cos the Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line,
The Rock Island Line is the road to ride...
Cold, front-room dreams,
As before the living-room fire,
Dozing fathers snored to Billy Cotton,
Red sails met the sunset,
And, in steam-filled kitchens, mothers beat
The gravy free of lumps.
Three-chord-trick fantasies. You gave the children of
The suburbs and the post-war slums
Swagger; brought to Burnley's cobbled streets
And Surbiton's mock Tudor towers these things:
The mud stink of the Louisiana levee,
Jack o' Diamonds in the stern wheeler's saloon;
Sylvie bringing a little water to the baking cotton field;
The old engineer, his hand still on the airbrake,
Scalded to death by the steam.
Brylcremed, crepe-soled, drainpipe daydreams.
In bare-bulb, damp, church-halls across this wintry land,
Washboards and tea-chests thumped their way
To the Cumberland Gap, and a generation of Lost Johns
Started putting on the style. We built the Coolee Dam,
Fought The Battle of New Orleans,
And ran with young Tom Dooley from the law;
And mostly, we rode the old Rock Island Line.
I fooled you, I fooled you
I got all pig iron, I got all pig iron.
'Cos the Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line,
The Rock Island Line is the road to ride.
Nobody's children in cold front-rooms,
You gave us songs to sing,
You gave us dreams to dream.
Mike Harding
Comment number 1.
At 21st Nov 2008, Keith wrote:My parents were great Lonnie Donegan fans. A few years ago I went along to a Van Morrison gig in the Grosvenor park in Chester. I couldn't believe how good the support act was at covering Lonnie Donegan songs. "Who is this?" I said to several people in the crowd. "He even sounds just like Lonnie". Well, as the evening wore on it became apparent it WAS Lonnie. The ticket had just said "Van Morrison plus support".
Lonnie was SUPERB and fortunately made up for Van being in one of his miserable "having a grump" moods and doing a most perfunctory set later.
Lonnie sadly died about a year later, so I never got to see him live again. But I did buy a couple of his CDs afterwards.
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