Git-Gat Skiffle

Into umbrous, ill-ventilated underground caverns, seemingly as necessary to life as the air-raid shelters where some of the visitors were born, thousands of bemused young Londoners squeeze nightly to stomp and holler their approval of Britain's latest musical mania: U.S. rock 'n' roll, commercial hillbilly and folk music, warmed over and juiced up in a mishmash called skiffle.

The beat is hard and jumping, the yodels are nasal, and the clipped British consonants that bristle occasionally among the carefully slurred ham-hock vowels are hilarious. The songs are chain-gang, camp-meeting U.S. imports: Wabash Cannonball, Frankie and Johnny, I Shall Not Be Moved. The musicians generally are amateurs, paid with coffee and Cokes, belting out their rockabilly on a couple of guitars, a banjo and a bass fiddle (sometimes store-bought, more often conjured out of an empty tea chest, a broomstick and a knotted string).

To the Soho hipsters who swelter and suffocate for it in the Cat's Whisker, the Cote d'Azur or The Two I's, skiffle is brand-new; to jazz critics and non-skiffling professional musicians, it is old--"a bastardized, commercialized form of the real thing," said one critic, "watered down to suit the sickly orange-juice tastes of musical illiterates."

New Orleans to Limehouse. No one seems to know exactly how skiffle got its name, but according to some jazz buffs, it appeared under that name at the rent parties held in Chicago in the '205. Dan Burley, oldtime Chicago jazz pianist, says the simple, two-beat blues was first played by groups of Negro teen-agers too poor to pay the fare into Chicago's hot jazz spots. "It was the product of the Depression, the fusion of gospel shouts, spirituals and time spent in hole-in-the-wall joints where you ate chili and got a bellyache." It is something of a mystery when skiffle began infecting the sailors' pubs of Limehouse and Whitechapel, but in recent months the craze has overrun London and swarmed across Britain.

Last week the U.S. got back what it gave when a cocky, 9 1/2-stone (133 Ibs.), skiffling Scotsman named Lonnie Donegan arrived with a four-man combo to play side music for basketball's famed Harlem Globetrotters, currently touring the U.S. Donegan, who cannot read music, hit the big time with a recording of Rock Island Line (on the London label in the U.S.), whose spoken introduction, beat and intonation copy almost exactly the style of a Negro ex-con and twelve string guitar player, the late Huddie ("Lead Belly") Ledbetter.

Coals to Newcastle. Crouching before the mike during halves of the Globetrotters' basketball ballet, Donegan crooks his right knee, pumps his foot convulsively and whangs his guitar, occasionally wrenching his pelvis Elvis-fashion. Most often he sounds like Grand Ole Opry cornball recorded at 33 1/3 r.p.m. played at 78. Backing up the young (25) Glasgow-born skiffler are a second guitarist, a two-beat drummer and the best showman of the combo, a red-goateed bass plucker named Mickey Ashman, who twirls his big fiddle, tops the act by rolling on the floor with it.

Donegan's coals-to-Newcastle versions of U.S. folk songs skiffled squeals out of the teenagers, but, according to a Raleigh, N.C. diagnostician, their yelping "has a spasmodic quality compared to the sustained ecstasy Elvis seems to inspire."

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