ABSTRACT
A great deal of popular music historicism still appears to lie on two rather simplistic ahistorical myths. Reinterpretations via 'returns' are constitutive of the schema of renewing past conventions in popular music. In the case of skiffle in the years between 1956 and 1959, young musicians found a freedom to explore popular music as a meaningful way of both extending sound possibilities and creating relationships between different aspects and echelons of British and American society. According to Malcolm Munro, the first manager of the Grafton Rooms, during its brief existence the Carnival Palais was possibly the largest ballroom in England. By ignoring pre-rock Liverpool, popular music writers reject whole sets of dominant social patterns that still exist because they do not like what they believe to be the tastes of the silent majority.
