Not the first cover - after Kelly Pace, Leadbelly and Lonnie Donegan...
From Billboard, listen - Dan Zanes and Billy Bragg
Billy Bragg and Joe Henry
John Lennon version
Lennon and McCartney
Carl Perkins
Original 1934 John Lomax recording of 'Rock Island Line' by Kelly Pace and Prisoners
Billy Bragg's Diary: would Harry Potter have voted for Brexit? New Statesman
A skiffler’s trip to the library
"I’m in Washington , DC , to deliver a talk at the Library of Congress on
skiffle, the 1950s roots music craze that introduced the guitar to UK pop music and acted as a nursery for the
British invasion of the US
charts. The movement began in January 1956, when Lonnie Donegan scored his
first hit single with a cover of Lead Belly’s classic railroad song “Rock
Island Line”.
I’ve been invited to speak at this august institution
because many of the skifflers were sourcing their material from the Library of
Congress recordings, which were available to borrow from the United States
Information Service at the embassy in Grosvenor
Square , London . The
library archivists have a special treat for me: the brown paper sleeve of the
original recording of “Rock Island Line” made by John A Lomax, assisted by Lead
Belly, at Cummins prison farm near Pine
Bluff , Arkansas , in
1934. The ten-inch shellac disc they cut that day is stored elsewhere, but the
sleeve, bearing Lomax’s handwritten notes, is removed from its protective
folder and passed to me. I become acutely aware that I’m holding in my hands an
artefact from the earliest moments of the genesis of British pop music".
Update, just discovered (November 2017): Rock Island Line: Leadbelly, Lonnie Donegan, and John Lennon, Tim Londergan (a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Indiana University-Bloomington)
Update, just discovered (November 2017): Rock Island Line: Leadbelly, Lonnie Donegan, and John Lennon, Tim Londergan (a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Indiana University-Bloomington)
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