Peter & Anthony Donegan Pay Tribute To Lonnie In Scarborough

At first hearing he’s got one of those beautiful Texas accents but there is something in it that I recognise from way back. Peter Donegan is telling me about his legendary father, Lonnie Donegan MBE, and I can hear something of the great man’s speaking voice and just a little of his accent.

Peter has forged his own career in music but like so many others he was hugely influenced by Lonnie, a giant figure in the development of music in this country. “As George Harrison put it: without Lonnie there was no Beatles,” he says, proudly, “because they originally started, in Liverpool, as the Quarrymen, a Skiffle group playing my Dad’s songs.”

The award-winning songwriter Peter and his older brother Anthony are coming on 17th May to the SJT, Scarborough, on tour with their tribute to the King of Skiffle. “It will be a night to remember, full of songs and stories about our father.”

In 2019, Peter entered ITV’s The Voice and performed a duet with Sir Tom Jones of I’ll Never Fall in Love Again, a song that Lonnie had written in the 1960s.

Anthony, of course, continues to keep the Skiffle legacy alive with the Lonnie Donegan Jnr Band, at theatres, festivals and events in the UK and abroad. But it’s rare the brothers come together to perform because Peter now lives in Romania and spends much of his time in his native USA, where he is a well-respected name in the Country Music scene.

“Anthony and I devised the show in tribute to our Dad, to talk about what it was like growing up with him, seeing him perform.” Apparently no two shows will ever be the same because they encourage audience participation and ad-lib lots of different stories.“We are really looking forward to performing some of the very best of Lonnie’s music. There will be lots of singing, laughter and foot-stamping!”

There will obviously be a lot of wonderful music to choose from even if they only manage to cover half of Lonnie’s 31 UK top 30 hit singles which collectively occupied 335 weeks on the official singles chart.

Lonnie gained three number one hits with Cumberland Gap, the double-sided Gamblin’ Man/Putting on the Style - and My Old Man’s a Dustman (originally recorded live in Doncaster). But it was Rock Island Line, his first recording, in early 1956, that changed the course of musical history - and shaped much of the musical taste of this critic for life.

Effectively a piece of revved-up twelve-bar blues, it brought Skiffle to the masses. You could hear it on the radio, being played on the record-player next door, being sung in the street, on the bus, in the school playground. Four young and impressionable Liverpudlians heard it too, as did the future members of the British pop bands who all fell under its spell.

Peter toured with his father as his pianist from the age of 18. “His band had all been with him for forty years so they taught me so much about music and the music business,” he remembers. “I never ever wanted to be anything but a musician, never considered any other profession.”

He has certainly made his own mark, particularly in America where his father is not as well known as in Britain, even though Rock Island Line reached eighth place in the American hit parade. Peter even managed to go one better in the local Country charts with his recording of his own composition Thankyou Texas, which went to number one and became the theme tune of the Texas radio station. He wrote in on his way to Lubbock, to take up a place as a scholar at the Buddy Holly Foundation.

It’s very rare that I talk to somebody of a much younger generation who can tell me anything about the music I grew up listening to, but during the course of an hour’s interview I gain endlessly fascinating insights, all of which and many more will no doubt come out in the show.

I knew of course that Lonnie gained his big break by playing banjo with Chris Barber, one of the biggest names in British Trad Jazz, which for much of the late 1950s was in the pop mainstream along with Skiffle and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

I never knew, however, that the two men bumped into each other on a London tube and Lonnie claimed he played banjo even though he’d never held one in his life. “Chris set him on and Dad rushed round to a music store and bought one,” he explains. “Trouble was - it was obvious at the first rehearsal he had no idea.” He pauses, for dramatic effect, as I ponder just how Lonnie managed to sound so brilliant on those early recordings.“Chris taught him a trick, how to tune it like the first four strings of a guitar and Dad played like that for the rest of his life!”

The evening promises to be full of precious insights like this for the purist and lots of wonderfully entertaining music and anecdotes for a packed house of young and old Skiffle fans. “Skiffle evolved but it never went away, as such as Elton John, Ronnie Wood, Albert Lee and many more are on record as saying.”

Lonnie Donnegan truly was an amazing performer whose music seemed to grow more frenetic by the minute. For one night only Skiffle, which came, rose and - unfortunately - fell like a comet, will burn bright again in Scarborough.

Don’t miss it. At the time of writing there are only 16 seats unsold.

Peter & Anthony Donegan: Lonnie Donegan, The Stories can be seen at the SJT at 7.45pm on Saturday 17th May. Tickets are available from the box office on 01723 370541 and online at www.sjt.uk.com