Rock Island Line

Rock Island Line

“Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line

If you want to ride it

Get your ticket at the station

On the Rock Island Line”

I’ve been watching a fascinating TV documentary on this song from the fifties. It has a great resonance with me as it was a favourite in 1957. The singer, Lonnie Donegan, chose many of his early songs from American, often black American songs. I listened to them at my friend Anthony’s house. I didn’t have access to a record player at home; we didn’t even have electricity. Both Anthony and I were big train enthusiasts ( we were train spotting buddies earlier ) and many of Donegan’s songs such as Wabash Cannonball and Wreck of the old ’97 were like this concerned with trains and railroads.

The significance of Rock Island Line is that, more than any other, it represented the change from the mix of ballads etc which had been popular music and ushered in the modern rock based pop music which has dominated ever since. This happened via a new “homemade” music called skiffle. Skiffle had a short life before it gave way to Elvis Presley and the like in the rock’n’roll genre. This was also heavily influenced by American blues tradition..

Rock Island Line was originally a prison song taken up by Hudie Ledbetter the famous American folk singer Leadbelly.. Hudie wrote the lengthy prologue which was itself highly unusual. Donegan gave it the verve and skiffle sound which made the song a huge popular success

Skiffle had a strange gestation as it was firstly interval music in jazz performances. At the time jazz, another precursor to modern pop, had split into several types.  There was swing, modern and traditional. The latter usually abbreviated to trad, adhered to the original New Orleans style. It was trad interval music that started skiffle. The skiffle combo had washboard, .guitar and tea chest bass. The washboard  of corrugated metal was rubbed rhythmically while the tea chest bass was an upturned large box ( typically a tea chest ) with a string attached to the centre ( the sounding board ) and to a broom handle. Plucking the string produced low notes varied in pitch by changing the string length

At school I was forced to study music because the alternative was art. I no talent for either so it was an arbitrary choice. A new boy in our group, Bob, was extremely self confident not to say bumptious and so annoyed our teacher that to shut him up was invited to give a talk on jazz. I’m sure we all expected a feeble performance but in the event Bob gave an excellent talk on the origins and progress of jazz.. My friend Anthony was interested in music and through him I also became friends with Bob.

Because I was his friend Bob gave me an audition on a tea chest bass for the skiffle group he formed. I was a miserable failure which didn’t surprise me as our music teacher had said I was tone deaf. Despite this we still remained close friends. In retrospect I find this quite surprising as we were quite different; I was rather quiet and diffident particularly around girls while Bob was extremely self confident and more than a bit anarchic.

It was actually via Bob I became involved with Annette. She was just one of many girls in our newly merged co-ed school. Bob would say to me that she seemed nice and he would ask her out. She gave him very short shrift but I was intrigued, talked to her a bit, then we went out and I've never looked back..