last thursday a girl was trying to convince me there was an ancient form of rabble-rousing roots music called "scuttle" that pre-dated boogie woogie, rock n roll, rockabilly and somehow formed the primordial goop that eventually became punk rock

i'm not sure what to think of this "missing link," if it even existed at all.

girl is prone to hyperbole.

rads? billyg?

Just a question - not that it covers any of this - think she was trying to talk about skiffle?

i think you hit the nail on the head. she had some letters mixed up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiffle

good one, gar

i've never heard of this until now. i think the punk rock connection may be a bit of a stretch but not entirely implausible.

That was gonna be my guess.

I think you should create scuttle, which sounds like a 1950s dance--"Hey, hey everyone! Its that time! Oh oh do the scuuuuuh-tel! Just like like a crab, a little like pigeon, do the scuuuuh-tel!"

Yeah I think the punk rock connection is that it was played by wanna-be rebels who had acquired more bravado than musical skills(think young John Lennon)

gotcha

there's a band here called Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band that she hangs around, so it all makes sense

Lonnie Donegan.

Rock Island Line. Hugely influential on a very young john and paul.

how about The Vipers? i see that name get thrown around

Skiffle didn't predate much of anything. Basically a polite Brit variant on rockabilly. If we were talking jump blues we'd be getting into the primordial goop.

The only Vipers I knew about were part of the first garage/psych revivalist wave (got their Outta The Nest album on vinyl), but a quick google search netted this: "The Vipers were, after Lonnie Donegan, the most successful skiffle act in England, charting a half-dozen singles between November of 1956 and October of 1958."

<----- big scuttle fan

That there's some fine scuttle.

Ignore Radcliffe. I'm not sure why his addled, ill formed opinions have become sage around here but perhaps its a case of 'in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king'.

Skiffle was influenced by past and contemporary music, as all music has since people started hitting rocks together, but it was important because it became nationally popular roughly a year to a year and a half before Elvis Presley popularized rock n' roll. In the sense that it was heard by significant numbers of people and inspired a youth following at a national level it predated most forms of what we might now call popular music. Putting it simply Lonnie Donegan was having hits and inspiring kids to form bands when Elvis still hanging around local recording studios.

Also "polite Brit variant on rockabilly"? Hardly. Skiffle was played harder, faster and with more energy than any other existing type of music at the time, which is why it attracted trouble makers like John Lennon and Pete Townsend who were hardly going to make a drawn to anything "polite". The fact that it was often played on home made instruments, by non professional musicians, in a rough and ready style (relative to the time) seem like valid reasons to drawn parallels with punk rock.

Skiffle waned in importance with the appearance of people like Elvis and Chuck Berry 12 to 18 months later, but it's importance was that it created the first generation of rebellious 'punk rock kids' who eventually took up the baton when rock n' roll died a death in the late fifties. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards etc, all started in skiffle bands. Skiffle was hugely important to the development of music, dismissing it as unimportant betrays an ignorance of staggering proportions.

Lonnie Donegan started his skiffle group in 1954. Contrast with one of the biggest hits of 1954, Perry Como's 'Wanted', and it shouldn't be too hard to imagine why scores teenagers up and down the UK went off and formed bands around a washboard and a soap box bass during 1954 - 1956.

I had no idea we had a skiffle historian among us

On the contrary, I am surprised that, on a "music" board there were so few skiffle "historians." Kinda one of the standard ingredients of rock. And "polite brit rockabilly" is, at best, an inadequate and misleading description.

That's just horseshit. Skiffle was played like the band was afraid of the drum set lest they be tarred as negro rabblerousers. There was way faster, harder, more energetic American R&B back in the '30s, let alone the '50s.

"Polite Brit variant on rockabilly" is the greatest and most accurate description of skiffle the world has ever known. I've gone and copyrighted AND trademarked it too, so don't go thinking you can just lift it to impress the next addled contessa you come across.

could you be confusing American skiffle with the British skiffle "craze"?

And any number of tribal musics that were even faster-harder-louder through the past centuries. I believe the question was what was this "mystery antecedent" called skiffle, not what was American R&B.

And I believe the statement I was responding to was this one:

I mean, jeez, even scuttle was harder and faster.

You've been called to account and you don't know what to do other than pull out some relatively uncommon words like 'rabblerousers' and 'contessa' in order to salvage some esteem.

You should stick to Scrabble, that's where your expertise lies.

Yeah, contessa was uncharateristically sloppy.

Point taken.

Rads just gets upset when anyone criticizes anything about America.