ABSTRACT
I want to examine the impact of American popular music on English popular music during the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, rather than the impact itself, which is well known, I want to think about the ways that American popular music was indigenized and incorporated into a continuity of English popular music that was focused on music hall and its mass media renovation as variety. In this chapter I shall be arguing that skiffle, although originally an American, indeed African-American, form, became, in its English reworking by artists such as Lonnie Donegan, a means of resistance to the impact of rock’n’roll. Many artists who started as skifflers went on to play important roles in the beat bands, helping to mould their distinctively English sound. As skiffle gave way to the beat groups so the English music-hall heritage resurfaced. This chapter ends with a brief overview of that music-hall influence on the early beat groups such as Herman’s Hermits, supplementing some of the remarks made at the close of Dave Laing’s chapter.
