IN THEIR WORDS
BILLY BRAGG IS OFTEN labeled a protest singer. He has, after all, frequently used his gift for poetic storytelling to campaign for left-wing causes. And in 1998, Nora Guthrie, daughter of American working-class champion Woody Guthrie, asked him to put her father’s unrecorded lyrics to music for a series of commemorative albums. The 60-year-old musician from Essex, England, however, prefers to use the moniker “topical songwriter.”
In his new book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffe Changed the World, Bragg takes his fight for underdogs’ justice to perhaps the most dismissed musical genre of the 20th century. It’s a 400-page paean to the makeshift bands British teenagers experimented with in the 1950s, seeking a raw new sound to define their generation. Playing acoustic guitar, washboard and tea-chest bass, they took inspiration from New Orleans jazz and American blues artists such as Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy. “I think skiffie deserves to have the same credibility as punk,” says Bragg. “It came and went so quickly.”