During the late 1970s and early 1980s Billy Bragg rode the wave of DIY punk rock to establish himself as a new kind of protest singer for (excuse the pun) a New England.

While firmly a part of the punk movement it’s easy to trace Bragg’s musical roots back to the folk movement that existed on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s and even further to early recordings made in the prisons of the Deep South of the USA in the 1920s and 30s.

Given his musical heritage then it seems only appropriate that it’s Bragg who has compiled Roots, Radicals And Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World, a history of skiffle, an often over looked British precursor to rock ‘n’ roll, that also traces its lineage to those same roots in the folk music of the American south.

While the ‘skiffle boom’ itself lasted barely two years, Bragg heads back into that past to tell his story not only giving it some excellent context often lost in other, briefer, discussions of the style, but also shedding a light on not just the music, but the overriding culture of Britain in the immediately post war years from a fascinating way.

The story Bragg tells really begins with the trad jazz movement and goes on to weave its way through the clubs of Soho (and beyond) to trace how that scene developed this strange little offshoot that became a chart topping phenomenon and how that, in turn, gave birth to the British blues boom that led to the Rolling Stones (and others) and the self written rock ‘n’ roll that became the pop of The Beatles.

What really makes the book work so well, and it does, is how Bragg never glosses over anything to cut to the chase so, while the somewhat confused history of the song Rock Island Line (in many ways the quintessential skiffle track), is covered fairly early on, he also goes deep into the trad scene, largely focussing on Ken Colyer and how he brought the traddiest of trad sounds to the UK following an eventful trip to New Orleans as a merchant seaman.

This brings a fascinating context to things and immerses the reader in a world long since lost to time as we feel like Bragg is leading us on a tour of this scene, from club to club and street to street of London’s Soho when it still was very much a separate community all of its own.

As it goes on and the music develops, first bringing in the mid set ‘breakdown groups’ of the jazz bands and then folk music thanks to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, we see how Soho developed with this and also we look further afield particularly around the UK but with jaunts to the US, Europe and even the Soviet Union as the political side of these new artists comes into play.

Through this we end up getting something of an oral history, through a series of interviews referenced throughout, of not just the music but the lives of young people of the time and a real feel for how quickly the ‘teenager’ truly became a thing in British culture — so much so that, by the mid point of the story, the initially radical feeling Colyer is relegated to feeling like an old man as the skiffle boom hits and even rock ’n’ roll begins.

Of course the star of the book, in many ways, is Lonnie Donegan. Bragg never challenges his title as King Of Skiffle as, while similar titles elsewhere in the musical world are debatable, it’s hard to find any one else who could hold this crown. But that’s not to say others don’t appear and we discover a host of other skiffle bands and musicians, initially those, like Donengan who grew from the trad scene and then those inspired by that ‘first wave’ who first made a scene of the Soho coffee houses that spawned early British rock ‘n’ roll.

As well as the social context of all of this the political context helps bring things to life and it’s no surprise Bragg does explore this with the Aldermaston marches being a particular stand out moment.

It’s through this, as well as the brief flash of the ‘boom’ that things are tied together with the British punk movement that I think is the master stroke in making the whole thing so accessible for a more modern reader.

Really for any fan of British music this is a must-read as it charts, in surprising depth, a period that is often forgotten, or at best a footnote in the history of what happened afterwards in the 1960s, and its hard to come away from it not feeling like this is a lost chapter in British social history generally overlooked for more ‘establishment’ stories.