Free Paul McCartney by Philip Norman Page B

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    After ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came out, much of Paul and George’s conversation revolved around Elvis–his astounding voice, his amazing clothes, the guitar that seemed his indispensable accomplice in whipping up female frenzy. George revealed that his bus-driving dad had learned to play the guitar while serving in the Merchant Navy and that he himself now possessed one. Paul in return made the rather less sensational announcement that he was learning the trumpet.
    Out of school hours, his main friend continued to be Ian James. They were both good-looking, and both equally obsessed by their hair and clothes. Among the new records currently on Radio Luxembourg was ‘A White Sport Coat’, by the American country singer Marty Robbins (anglicised into ‘A White Sports Coat’ by Britain’s King Brothers). Paul had searched high and low for such a garment and finally found one in silver-flecked oatmeal, cut in daring Teddy boy ‘drape’ style with a flap on its breast pocket. Ian had a similar Elvis quiff and DA and a similar jacket in pale blue.
    He also had access to a guitar just at this moment when the eyes of British boys were becoming riveted to the instrument. His grandfather had been bandmaster to the local Salvation Army in the Dingle and he’d grown up with a Spanish guitar around the house–then considered nothing but a background rhythm-maker. When the skiffle craze arrived, and Paul finally got a guitar of his own, Ian looked like his natural musical partner.
    Skiffle derived from American folk music during the Great Depression when poor whites who couldn’t afford conventional instruments would improvise them from kitchen washboards, jugs, and kazoos. In its British reincarnation, it became a mash-up of blues, country, folk, jazz and spirituals–all genres about which most young Britons had little or no previous knowledge.
    Its biggest, in fact only, star was Lonnie Donegan–like Paul, of mixed Irish and Scots origins–who had previously played banjo with Chris Barber’s jazz band. In 1956, Donegan and a rhythm section from the Barber band recorded a skiffle version of ‘Rock Island Line’ by the blues giant (and convicted killer) Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter. Its subject matter, railroad-tolls on Rock Island, Illinois, could hardly have been more mundane, but that word ‘rock’, in any context, now set schoolboy hormones aflame. ‘Rock Island Line’ went to number eight in Britain and also became a hit across the Atlantic, an unprecedented example of British musicians selling Americana back to the Americans.
    Skiffle offered the romance of America–chiefly represented by freight trains, penitentiaries and chain-gangs–but without the taint of sex and Teddy boy violence attached to rock ‘n’ roll. The BBC relented so far as to put on a radio programme called Saturday Skiffle Club and an early-evening TV show especially for teenagers titled like a train, the Six-Five Special, with skiffle theme music. Whereas rock ‘n’ roll was an unknowable alchemy created by incomprehensible beings, skiffle could be played by anyone with a cheap acoustic guitar and mastery of the three simple chords of 12-bar blues. Its other essential instruments were literally home-made: ‘basses’ improvised from resonant empty boxes, broom-handles and bits of string, and serrated kitchen washboards, scrubbed with fingers capped by steel thimbles to create a scratchy, frenetic percussion.
    The effect was galvanising on bashful British boys with no previous musical leanings who, hitherto, would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up in public and sing. All over the country, juvenile skiffle groups sprang–or, rather, strummed–into life under exotically homespun names, like the Vipers, the Nomads, the Hobos, the Streamliners and the Sapphires. The guitar rocketed even further in popularity, so much so that at one point a national shortage was declared.
    In November 1956, when Lonnie Donegan