Politics & Power Quote by Van Morrison

Skiffle, in Van Morrison's telling, isn’t a precious British invention so much as a mislabeled import with a pulse. His phrasing - “a name that was attached” - subtly strips the genre of romance and ownership. It sounds like something slapped on by critics, promoters, or teenagers needing a handle for a sound they couldn’t quite categorize. The real point is in the pivot: “in essence.” Morrison is insisting on lineage over branding, ancestry over hype.

Calling it “American folk music with a beat” is doing two jobs at once. It honors the source material - Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, the blues and work songs that crossed the Atlantic on records and radio - while explaining why skiffle detonated in postwar Britain. The “beat” is key: it’s what made the music portable, danceable, playable on cheap guitars and homemade setups, a gateway drug to rock’n’roll for kids without money or access. That democratic DIY energy is the unspoken heart of skiffle’s mythology, and Morrison nods to it without sentimentalizing it.

There’s also a quiet corrective here. British pop history often frames skiffle as a quaint pre-Beatles chapter; Morrison frames it as cultural translation. Britain didn’t just copy America - it re-timed it, literally, and that rhythmic tweak became a generation’s entry point into modernity. In one clipped sentence, he recasts a fad as a conduit.