Review - Lonnie Donegan: Lonnie (1957)
Tracks: 1) Lonesome Traveller; 2) The Sunshine Of His Love; 3) Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos; 4) Ain’t You Glad You Got Religion; 5) Times Are Getting Hard, Boys; 6) Lazy John; 7) Light From The Lighthouse; 8) I’ve Got Rocks In My Bed; 9) Long Summer Day; 10*) Aunt Rhody; 11*) Whoa Back, Buck.
REVIEW
It might be a little too much, perhaps, to seriously talk about «artistic growth» when talking about Lonnie Donegan, the man who found himself a working formula and rode it all the way to the bank and, later on, all the way to oblivion. But it could still be argued that Lonnie’s self-titled second album was notoriously less «commercial» than the debut, moving into deeper, more spiritual territory — without losing the quasi-rock’n’roll exuberance of its predecessor, but opting for a darker, less playful tone all the same. There are some old timers out there who actually point to Lonnie as his masterpiece, and after a couple of listens I can hear why.
For one thing, the album features a different style of production: throughout the sessions, Lonnie moves in closer on the mike, dropping the echoey effect which instantaneously gave him a sort of «star vibe»; ‘Wabash Cannonball’ gave the impression of an aspiring young artist giving it his all at some sprightly TV audition, but ‘Lonesome Traveller’, opening this record, rather gives us a weary, slightly melancholic old troubadour, with a sack of humble charisma making up for the lack of grizzly authenticity. In fact, it is generally easier to forget that you are really dealing with an impersonator over the course of these songs than on Showcase, perhaps, ironically, precisely because Lonnie isn’t trying that hard. On songs like ‘Times Are Getting Hard, Boys’, he adopts a soft, introspective vocal tone, with occasional elements of recitative, and never strays far from his middle range; on ‘Light From The Lighthouse’, he leads his backing lads in an expectedly rousing spiritual, but does so with restraint and playfulness rather than trying to throw a possessed spiritual fit in an African American manner. None of these tunes feature the sort of audience-inciting tricks he’d do so expertly with ‘Rock Island Line’ — which, I might suggest, makes the average performance here less exciting and less annoying at the same time.
Of note is the presence of electric instrumentation on a few of the tracks: in particular, the lengthy blues number ‘I’ve Got Rocks In My Bed’ features several decent, though not outstanding, electric solos — perhaps this could be enough to label Lonnie as the UK’s first electric bluesman (at the very least, this definitely precedes Alexis Korner). I honestly have no idea whether a move like that could be considered traitorous in the skiffle movement circa 1957, but it definitely does not help out much: Lonnie is still at his best not when he delivers a textbook case of slow 12-bar blues, but rather when he revs it up on numbers like the closing ‘Long Summer Day’, a song where you have to listen really hard to realize that it is a slave working song because here, it is really all about the little man slowly whipping himself into a trance — here, it is all about vocal acrobatics in which the line "long summer day make a white man lazy" is used more like a gymnastic ribbon than a genuine sarcastic slogan. And it works — an album that began by putting you in a grim mood eventually snaps out of it and leaves you with a spinning head and an overall positive vibe.
Personally, I find this album a bit weaker than the debut precisely because, like you said, of the restraint he shows. When Lonnie would shred his vocal chords and sing like a mad British hillbilly, that’s when his charisma comes out in full force because, at worst, we get something amusing and playful, and at best, we get covers that reach the heights of “Nobody’s Child” and “Frankie & Johnny” (the latter of which is one of my favorite performances of the decade that I have heard!). This restraint might be more “mature”, but at that point, why should I hear Lonnie perform it and not the authentic American folk scene instead. Still, good record, and “Lonesome Traveler” is fantastic!