PMH/Was it really like that?: ‘Rock Island Line’ and the instabilities of causational popular music histories

In an attempt to re-think ways in which the popular music past is represented, Mike Brocken looks at Lonnie Donegan’s recording of ‘Rock Island Line’ and questions the historical purposes that this seminal recording appears to have served for subsequent popular music writers and historians. Donegan, according to Brocken, is afforded very little historical authenticity due to his flirtation with the mainstream, while ‘Rock Island Line’ is historicized only as a form of 'ur-history’ to apparently more authentic soundtracks that appeared to follow. By focusing more upon space, time and synchronic fact (and away from the ‘event’ that can be more easily narrated), Brocken suggests that our historical knowledge of this seminal recording has been constructed in very specific ways. He concludes by suggesting that the epistomological, methodological and ideological factors concerning the historiography of skiffle, Donegan and ‘Rock Island Line’ in serving ‘rock-ist’ and ‘folk-ist’ narratives, all require urgent investigation.