So, who digs skiffle?
(Crickets.)
OK. But everybody digs Lonnie Donegan, at least, right?
(More crickets. And a few spazzy grasshoppers playing air crickets.)
Lonnie Donegan was the king of skiffle. Skiffle was a form of folk music that was popular in the UK for a while. This is all Wikipediable, of course.
When I was 4 or 5 years old, my mom had a 45 in her collection -- in the section with all the records marked "NO" in ballpoint pen, which meant I wasn't to mess with them (after I had scratched up her vintage copy of Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes"), which "NO" of course meaning that those were the platters to home in on, of course -- that was the first record I think I ever really flipped for. It was Lonnie Donegan's 1958 recording of "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight)".
When I played that song on the stereo in the basement, I used to utterly unhinge, freak out like a toddler monkey on caffeinated cocaine, and do a dance that consisted of facing the couch in our basement rec room and grabbing the cushions with both hands, bending at the waist, and slamming my head to the left and right, back and forth, as fast and hard as I could, onto the couch cushions, until I collapsed in exhaustion. Oy, I don't envy people with small children. But I do envy their kids.
Thanks to the magic that is the Tube of You, here's a video of Lonnie performing "Does Your Chewing Gum etc" on German TV in 1972, right around the time I was bashing my skull against upholstery to the studio recording of it.
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