‘A West Indian? You must be joking! I come out of the East End’
Kenny Lynch and English racism in the 1950s and 1960s
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v5i3.305Keywords:
1960s pop, British black music, Kenny Lynch, racismAbstract
Kenny Lynch was the first successful black British pop singer. Lynch moved from singing jazz standards to popular music in 1960. By the mid-1960s, when his popularity as a singer declined, Lynch was on his way to becoming the most well-known black, British-born, all-round entertainer in Britain. He worked as a song-writer, an actor in films and as a stand-up comedian. As Lynch developed his successful career, Britain was in the grip of a race-based scare about West Indian, and South Asian, immigration. There has been little work published on post-Second World War British-born popular singers before the era of the post-1948 West Indian migration. This article explores the racial context of Lynch’s success and explores the positioning of Lynch as a British-born black man.
References
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Discography
Lynch, Kenny. 2004. Nothing But the Real Thing: The Best of 1960–1969. RPM R 715914.
Barfe, L. 2008. Turned Out Nice Again: The Story of British Light Entertainment. London: Atlantic Books.
Chambers, I. 1985. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Collier, G. 1976. Cleo and John: A Biography of the Dankworths. London: Quartet.
Dominic, S. 2004. The Little Red Book of Burt Bacharach. London: Omnibus.
Eder, B. n.d. ‘Billy Fury: Biography’. AllMusic Guide, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p4324.
Frame, P. 2007. The Restless Generation: How Rock Music Changed the Face of 1950s Britain. London: Rogan House.
Frith, S. 1988. ‘Playing with Real Feeling: Making Sense of Jazz in Britain’. New Formations 4: 7–24.
Fryer, P. 1984. Staying Power: Black People in Britain since 1504. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Gillett, C. 1971. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. London: Souvenir.
Hiro, D. 1973. Black British/White British, rev. edn. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
Jaafar, A. 2003. ‘Curry and Chips (1969)’. Screenonline, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ tv/id/535237/.
Johnson, F. M. L. 1990. The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liverpool, H. U. 1994. ‘Researching Steelband and Calypso Music in the British Carribean and the U.S. Virgin Islands’. Black Music Research Journal 14/2: 179–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/779483
Lynch, K. 1992. ‘Kenny Lynch’. In Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television since 1936, ed. J. Pines, 108–113. London: BFI.
Malik, S. 2001. Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television. London: SAGE.
—n.d. ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’. Encyclopedia of Television, Volume 1, ed. Horace Newcomb and Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/ eotvsection.php?entrycode=blackandwhim.
The Man. n.d. http://www.billyfury.com/furyman.htm.
Marks, A. 1990. ‘Young, Gifted and Black: Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean Music in Britain 1963–1968’. In Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music, ed. P. Oliver, 102–117. Milton Keynes: Open University.
McKay, G. 2005. Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Medhurst, A. 2007. A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities. London: Routledge.
Melly, G. 1970. Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain. London: Allen Lane.
Moore, H. 2007. Inside British Jazz: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Nowell, D. 2001. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson.
Oldham, A. L. 2001. Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s. London: Secker & Warburg.
Oliver, P. 1990. ‘Introduction to Part II’. In Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music, ed. P. Oliver, 79–86. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Pickering, M. 2008. Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Radano, R. M. 1993. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sandbrook, D. 2005. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. London: Little Brown.
—2006. White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Little Brown.
Shapiro, H. 1996. Alexis Korner: The Biography. London: Bloomsbury.
SoulBot. live Soul. love Soul. n.d. ‘Ready Steady Go!’, http://www.soulbot.com/rsg.htm.
Stratton, J. 2009. Jews, Race, and Popular Music. Farnham: Ashgate.
Sutton, M. 2003. ‘Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964)’. the digital fix, October 24, http:// homecinema.thedigitalfix.com/content.php?contentid=5890.
Tyler, K. 2004. Liner notes for Kenny Lynch, Nothing But the Real Thing.
Unterberger, R. n.d. ‘The Very Best of… Kenny Lynch’. allmusic. http://www.allmusic.com/ album/the-very-best-ofkenny-lynch-r397368/review.
Whirligig: 1950’s British Television Nostalgia. n.d. ‘Tonight’. http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/ tv/adults/tonight/tonight.htm.
Wikipedia. n.d. ‘Bert Weedon’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Weedon.
Wilmer, V. 2003. ‘Obituary of Maxine Daniels’. The Guardian, October 30. http://www. guardian.co.uk/news/2003/oct/30/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries.
www.45rpm.org.uk. n.d. ‘Kenny Lynch’. http://www.45-rpm.org.uk/dirk/kennyl.htm.
Discography
Lynch, Kenny. 2004. Nothing But the Real Thing: The Best of 1960–1969. RPM R 715914.
Published
2012-01-25
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Stratton, J. (2012). ‘A West Indian? You must be joking! I come out of the East End’: Kenny Lynch and English racism in the 1950s and 1960s. Popular Music History, 5(3), 305-326. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v5i3.305
