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Personal essays


Skiffle - Essay from Newsletter 130

The thing before the thing

Scouse

I spent Kim’s birthday in Wales running a workshop at iOSDevUK.

It was my first time on a plane in more than two and a half years - which is amazing given that before the pandemic I was traveling two to three times a month and over half of the trips were to Europe.

I saved $700 by flying through Brussels and now that the UK is no longer in the EU, I stepped off my plane from Chicago and got in line at the very next gate for my flight without going through passport control or customs.

A couple hours later I was in Manchester and a couple of hours and two trains later I was in Liverpool.

With all of my trips to England, I’ve never been to Liverpool and a friend suggested it. I’d tried to get to Edinburgh on my way to Wales but couldn’t make it work.

So I went to the birthplace of the Beatles and visited Strawberry Field, a Beatles museum, the Tate Modern, and the British Music Experience.

Other than that I did a lot of walking and enjoyed two versions of scouse.

You know the way that people from Liverpool talk (think of old Beatles interviews)? That’s often called a scouse accent. But scouse originally refers to a dish which is essentially a beef stew. I had one ok one and one really good one.

The war

I stored my bags in my hotel room and took a bus to Strawberry Field.

There’s not a lot there but I learned a lot about John Lennon and Liverpool that I never knew.

They were a german target during the second world war because of their importance as a port city.

These attacks targeted civilians and left more than four thousand dead and one hundred thousand homeless.

The bombings were also not well-reported in the media because England didn’t want Germany to know how successful the attacks had been.

I read the news from Ukraine and am saddened at how little we learn from our history.

The line wasn’t drawn - but I wonder if that’s why peace was such an important cause to Lennon. He’d spent much of his childhood playing at Strawberry Field - a children’s home in Liverpool near his home.

Roots

The British Music Experience is a very clever setup. When you enter the single very large room there’s an open area in the middle and a screen at the front. To your left and right are aisles each focusing on a decade or a period of music.

There is a ton of information packed into each small aisle with audio stories and exhibits.

Every half hour the room darkens and a video is shown on the large screen with the music cranked up to accompany it.

Everyone wanders over from whatever they were looking at and watches a five minute presentation together.

The show ends and everyone heads back to whatever they were looking at before the show.

Anyway, the first aisle is on Skiffle and features stories about Lonnie Donegan and others who made the British skiffle revival huge.

Skiffle is kind of a folk music often featuring guitar, banjo, a washboard for percussion, and maybe a tea-chest bass.

Classic songs cited are often “Rock Island Line” and “John Henry”, and people my age remember Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” which was essentially a skiffle tune from the 1970s.

Results

One of the results of the popularity of Skiffle was that a lot of guitars were sold in the UK.

In addition a lot of Skiffle bands appeared.

This is the thing before the thing.

The Quarrymen was a Skiffle group that John Lennon founded in 1956. A year later Paul McCartney joined and a year after that George Harrison joined.

The band started to evolve away from the folk sound and towards Rock and Roll and recorded Buddy Holly’s “That’ll be the day.”

Although Holly was american, he was very important to the british and was featured at the British Music Experience (along side Jimi Hendrix).

I’d forgotten that Holly was only 22 when he died.

So Skiffle begat the Beatles.

Lennon also cited the importance of Elvis and Little Richard and each of them had their influences.

One of my favorite parts of Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is the influences section where you can hear the musicians we never hear about on whose shoulders the legends stood.

I’ve known about the Beatles and rock all of my life but had never heard of Skiffle.

I wonder how many things there are like that - the thing before the thing - the thing that the thing never would have become the thing without this early thing - those things I’ve just never heard of.

Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 130. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe


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