Skiffle - a ٢do-it-yourself٣ music craze with American jazz, blues, folk, and roots influences - is a story of jazz pilgrims and blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee-bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthyite witch hunts. Skiffle is reason the guitar came to the forefront of music in the UK and led directly to the British Invasion of the US charts in the 1960s. Emerging from the trad-jazz clubs of the early '50s, skiffle was adopted by the first generation of British ٢teenagers٣ - working class kids who grew up during the dreary, post-war rationing years. Before Skiffle, the pop culture was dominated by crooners and mediated by a stuffy BBC. Lonnie Donegan hit the charts in 1956 with a version of Lead Belly's ٢Rock Island Line٣ and soon sales of guitars rocketed from 5,000 to 250,000 a year. Like punk rock that would flourish two decades later, skiffle was home grown: all you needed were three guitar chords and you could form a group, with mates playing tea-chest bass and washboard as a rhythm section. ROOTS, RADICALS AND ROCKERS is the first book to explore the Skiffle phenomenon in depth - Billy Bragg's meticulously researched and joyous account shows how Skiffle sparked a revolution that shaped pop music as we have come to know it.