![]() The skiffle genre is the thread running through Morrison’s diverse career. One of the teachers at Orangefield School told me I was going to be a singer before I knew it myself.” “I didn’t know I was going to do it professionally. “I was in a smoky room, hearing Lead Belly and Jelly Roll Morton, and I connected with it early on,” he remembers. There he would hear early 20th century folk, blues and jazz music that started life in the prisons and fields of Mississippi and the bars and brothels of New Orleans. His love for American music began during childhood when his father would bring him to record store Atlantic Records, a famous shop in the heart of Belfast, to hang out and listen to music with proprietor Solly Lipsitz. This record retranslates songs from that era.” ![]() “I was still in school when I performed with a skiffle band – a couple of guitars, a washboard and a tea-chest bass,” says Morrison, who grew up in East Belfast, “I was already familiar with Lead Belly’s recordings, so when I heard Lonnie Donegan’s version of Rock Island Line I intuitively understood what he was creating. And nobody has inhabited that music, over an entire lifetime, as much as Van Morrison. By the time it reached the UK, largely thanks to enthusiasts such as Ken Colyer, Chris Barber and Lonnie Donegan - who scored a massive hit in 1955 with his skiffle take on blues legend Lead Belly’s Rock Island Line - it became an entry point for a generation of callow British youth into the endlessly absorbing world of American blues, folk, jazz and country music. Skiffle has its roots in the African-American jug bands of 1920s New Orleans, who got around a lack of funds for proper musical instruments by using washboards, tea chests, jugs and tubs to appropriate their own take on the country blues. Or that it takes a homemade style that exploded across Britain in the mid-1950s and brings to it a level of sophistication and soulfulness it didn’t always possess first time round. It should come as no surprise that Van Morrison has made an album inspired by skiffle.
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