The news was confirmed overnight (April 27th) in a statement on the songwriter’s social media channels, penned by his son, Simeon Jones. Wizz Jones had been in poor health for some time, and passed away in a hospice two days after his 86th birthday
Born and brought up in Surrey, Wizz Jones became fascinated with the guitar following the impact of the skiffle movement. Drawn to American influences, he grew his hair long after seeing pictures of Woozy Guthrie and members of the Beat Generation – his mother gave him the long-standing nickname, inspired by Beano character Wizzy the Wuz.
A forward-thinking acoustic guitarist, Wizz Jones soon became a key fixture of the London folk scene, influencing those around him. Finally releasing his solo debut in 1969, he balanced a singular career with a long-standing passion for collaboration.
Writing, recording, and touring across the decades, the 21st century seemed to allow this perennially underrated figure to take a bit more of the limelight. Touring until the end, Wizz Jones played his final show at London’s Ivy House earlier this year.
In the note from his family, son Simeon Jones writes:
With an extremely heavy heart, I’m letting you all know that my beloved father, the great Wizz Jones, passed away early this morning, two days after his 86th birthday.
His loss has left a huge hole in the lives of our family and has robbed the music world of one of its precious treasures.
His health declined rapidly this year and we thank Trinity Hospice for making his last few days as comfortable as possible.
Always a humble man, these were his closing words at the end of his last ever gig earlier this year, February 28th 2025:
“Thanks to all the people – all over the world in fact – that heard my songs and my guitar playing, and came to my gigs for all those years. Thank you very much.”
Here’s a song from that gig, written by his life-long dear friend Alan Tunbridge.
Wizz was worried about disappointing the audience with his now weak singing voice, but even more worried about letting them down by not showing up…
Spoiler alert – it’s a bit of a tear-jerker.
I hope his wonderful music will live on and continue to make the world a richer place.
Thank you for all the love you’ve given him through the years.
Before rock and roll would sweep through the landscape and the consciousness of the youth, a forgotten musical genre held a nation in its grip. A rhythmic, urgent music of expression and movement that was simple and accessible due to the addition of improvised homemade instrumentation, it let anyone form a band, and many did. In 1957, when a 15-year-old Paul McCartney first saw a 16-year-old John Lennon playing a gig at a Village Fete in Liverpool, Lennon wasn’t playing rock and roll, he was playing skiffle. The Rolling Stones, The Who, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and many more would all start out in skiffle groups. Let’s take a trip on a freight train down the Rock Island line and explore the phenomenon that was skiffle.
For around 18 months during the mid-1950s, a musical genre with its origins in American blues, jazz, bluegrass, and jug bands would become the catalyst for the start of the British music scene. Post-war England was still trapped in rationing until 1954, a dreary landscape of tradition and shades of grey. The “teenager” hadn’t been invented and the youth were expected to complete school, work or study, then settle down and replicate their parents’ lives. But something was stirring, since the end of the war there had been a baby boom, a rebuilding of the landscape and an economic upturn had meant there was more casual labor for most. What resulted was that young people had means and money in their pockets, and they were going to help invent their own culture. Jazz had been the popular music in Britain since the 1940s, a swinging traditional take on southern African American music; bands played in halls and pubs across the country and this would be where skiffle would manifest itself.
(Pictured) Ken Colyer; Alex Korner; Lonnie Donegan; Bill Colyer and Chris Barber
Ken Coyle was a band leader and trumpet player with the Crane River Jazz Band from West London. He’d been a leading figure in the British jazz scene and exponent of New Orleans sound since he’d actually jumped ship and landed there to play with local musicians. Now he’d formed his own popular ensemble, the Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen which featured Lonnie Donegan on banjo, the musician who would become the most influential artist in skiffle.
Scottish-born Donegan had grown up in London and he’d learned guitar, become interested in blues and jazz, and played for several bands in the 1940s before he’d be drafted for national service. He’d changed his name to Lonnie in honour of the blues musician Lonnie Johnson. On his return he’d wound up playing banjo for Coyler in his trad jazz band. It was during this period in 1953 that skiffle would be created.
The word skiffle has its origins in African American rent parties, a social phenomenon that began in 1920s Harlem where tenants would essentially raise money to pay their rent by throwing a party. Bands performed to collect money in a hat, usually with improvised instruments, which had been labeled as “Skiffle” music. Many 1920s blues records had also used the title ‘Home town Skiffle’ and ‘Skiffle Blues’
Now Coyler would pluck this appellative out of the air and bestow it on the music that was being created during the breaks in the trad jazz sets. The breaks or the breakdown bands were there to keep the audience engaged while the brass section rested their numb lips. Lonnie Donegan accompanied by a double bass, drummer, and banjo would run through his repertoire of old Lead Belly folk and blues covers. Lead Belly had been discovered serving time in a penitentiary in the 1920s American South by John and Alan Lomax while working for the Library of Congress collecting lost folk music. Donegan had heard these recordings and made his own unique interpretation of those working songs, murder ballads, prison blues, and traditional folk.
The result was a new approach to an older genre. Donegan had realized that trying to emulate something that he hadn’t lived and experienced was spurious. So, they changed the phrasing, raised the tempo, made it swing, rattle, and rock, and Donegan delivered the vocals in a shouting blues bawl. The ‘breaks’ started to become more popular than the main sets.
There was an audience for this new sound and Donegan would be out in the vanguard of the musical transition. Other skiffle groups began to appear on the scene, and nights began popping up in back rooms of pubs in cellars and sheds across London.n 1955, Donegan would release the most important song in skiffle a version of Lead Belly’s Rock Island line. This raced up the charts in the UK and even in America, peaking at number 8, selling over a million copies. It fired on a scattering rhythm and shotgun delivery, a whirling pace that charged into the gangling limbs of the youth, the likes of which had not been heard before in Britain. Skiffle had arrived.
Almost overnight, skiffle bands were formed. It became massive in a relatively short time, not just because of the rousing effect of the music, but because anyone could have a go. You didn’t need to be a proficient musician – you had to know 3 chords, have a guitar, and some household items. For the percussion, a steel washboard usually used for cleaning clothes was now played with a coin or by placing thimbles on the end of fingers to make a scraping, rhythmic beat. For a bass, an old tea chest box was used with an added broom handle and string, to give a plonking sonorous rumble. Add a guitar and an optional kazoo and away you go.
Billy Bragg travels back through the primeval swamps of skiffle and beyond. TV review by James Woodall
If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot, though that doesn’t necessarily disqualify it from the hour-long documentary treatment. For blues lovers, it’s a benchmark. “Rock Island Line” dates from the late 1920s and was first recorded in 1934.
Billy Bragg dependably and articulately fronted up this BBC Four history of the song, a protest paean to, or (as it might once have been called) a Negro spiritual about, a railroad network begun in the mid-19th century. Trains eventually steamed to many points west, south and north of Chicago – Rock Island sits west of Chicago, on the east bank of the Mississippi.
Those first recorded voices of the song belonged to black prisoners in Arkansas, way to the south. Key here was that another erstwhile convict, Huddie William Ledbetter – aka Lead Belly, who was violent but musically hugely influential on the 1950s and 1960s: Dylan references him on his first album – was present at the recording, clocked the performance and made the song his own. He died in 1949.
Singer/songwriter Billy Bragg gained fame as a punk rock and folk musician in the 1980s. Now nearing 60, he’s still singing songs of protest and passion, but also singing the gospel of skiffle, a folk and blues-inspired genre that helped propel a generation of British rockers. Jeffrey Brown sits down with Bragg to discuss his new book, “Roots, Radicals and Rockers.”
