Jasmine Records Lonnie DONEGAN & LEINEMANN - Lonnie Donegan Meets Leinemann - The Complete Sessions CD

By the end of the 1960s, it might have seemed that Lonnie Donegan's career was going nowhere - but that career to date had been startling. Through the mid-1950s he had been the banjo player with Chris Barber's Jazz Band, with moments of glory as singer/guitarist of that band's 'Skiffle' unit. By the end of 1956, he was Britain's biggest 'Pop' sensation and as the decade finished, he had progressed from being 'King Of Skiffle' to an all-round entertainer with an enviable trail of record chart hits behind him. Who could doubt that the 1960s would continue in the same way? However, the march of musical progress had other ideas. The hits became harder to find, not entirely helped by Donegan's various changes of style. The Party's Over, the penultimate chart success in 1962, summed up at least the record sales part of Donegan's career, the curtain being brought down a few months later with a return to old styles in Pick A Bale Of Cotton. Ironically, the public had rejected the single which had been issued between the two, I'll Never Fall In Love Again; revived five years later, in the gutsier hands of Tom Jones it became a Number One hit. Donegan didn't miss out entirely, however, as he had the copyright for the song safely tucked up in his own music publishing company. (Some years later, when Elvis Presley forgot that he was Elvis Presley and started imitating Tom Jones [for whom Presley was, ironically, his role model], he too recorded the song.)