Although he will be remembered by those of a certain age as king of the skiffle craze that swept Britain in the early 1950s, Lonnie Donegan deserves a more important place in the reckonings of pop historians than he is generally accorded. For if it was Bill Haley and Elvis Presley who spearheaded the rock'n'roll invasion of the British Isles in those heady years, it was Donegan who played the key role in making American-rooted music accessible to aspirant performers in this country. Certainly his was the decisive influence on the subsequent course of pop music in this country.

The success he made of a beguiling mixture of the Leadbelly/Woody Guthrie idiom and the completely different English music-hall is perhaps not so startling in retrospect as it seemed at the time. Skiffle, as it emerged from the British jazz boom, had its roots in the songs of American labour unions in the earlier part of the century, which themselves drew much from the music of English, Irish and Scottish immigrants. The shape skiffle assumed in this country owed much to Donegan's passion for such music from a very early age.

Quite apart from such academic considerations and an astonishingly prolific and intense recording career of 27 Top 20 hits in six years, Donegan is recalled with affection by all those who participated in the do-it-yourself music craze he launched in the wake of Rock Island Line, his first big hit, in 1956.

Skiffle, in its pristine form, needed none of the expensive paraphernalia that became the sine qua non of rock debutants. The double-bass, a broomstick implanted in a tea-chest, and the washboard plus a few thimbles to extract the obligatory rasping sound from it, could be acquired by rummaging through grandma's (if not mother's) junk room. For the rest, a simple acoustic guitar (or banjo) could be acquired for a tenner. And no great mastery of that instrument's potential was required. Three chords played in a few different keys enabled many a canny practitioner to strut the stage without his musicianship being called into question.

The young (and not-so-young) everywhere rushed to join in this cheap and enjoyable way of participating in the craze which was suddenly to be heard not only in skiffle clubs at nights but on beaches or on the decks of cross-Channel ferries in the summertime. Donegan's cheery Cockney-style personality (notwithstanding his Glaswegian birth) had a good deal to do with this and it was a heartening matter to those who had been his devotees that when his pop singing career was swept into oblivion by the advent of the Beatles, he was able to carry on with a successful one in music- hall and in straight drama on stage and television.

Lonnie Donegan was born Anthony James Donegan in Glasgow in 1931. His father was a violinist with the National Scottish Orchestra and he grew up in a musical household. In childhood and his teenage years Donegan listened to whatever American folk music he could obtain on record and also immersed himself in folklore.

He bought his first guitar at 17, and when he was called up to do his National Service in the Army he played with the Wolverines jazz band. On discharge he played banjo with Ken Colyer's band, where he first became acquainted with the skiffle style.

This had its origins in the Chicago jug bands of the 1920s in which simple "found" instruments replaced the traditional rhythm section and voices played the role of the frontline instruments. By the time Donegan had finished with it, however, skiffle had become a very different creature.

In 1951 Donegan formed his own group, changing his name to Lonnie after appearing along with his idol, Lonnie Johnson, at the Royal Albert Hall. Two years later he joined Chris Barber, and in 1954 he performed a version of Leadbelly's Rock Island Line for a Barber band album called New Orleans Joys. With its highly appealing, tearaway style, the Donegan track was often requested and received a good deal of airplay over the next 12 months. It was eventually released as a single and in 1956 it reached No 8 in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Donegan was later to say of Rock Island Line, which earned him no more than the Pounds 3. 10s he was paid as session fee : "It didn't get me any money but it did give me a career."

It certainly did. A stream of hits followed: Cumberland Gap (1957), Gambling Man/Putting on the Style (1957) and My Old Man's a Dustman (1960) all made No 1, with the last actually entering the charts in that position. A frankly Cockney affair with its opening verse: "My old man's a dustman, / 'E wears a dustman's 'at. / 'E wears gorblimey trah'sers / An 'e lives in a cah'ncil flat," it was particularly refreshing in a pop culture in which the American accent had, till then, been more or less obligatory.

Other high-risers - which, it has to be said, all wear very well even at this distance in time - were Bring a Little Water Sylvie (1956); that oft-used theme tune, Tom Dooley (1957); the humorously anti-British ditty Battle of New Orleans (1959); an attractive rendering of the familiar I Wanna Go Home (1960) and an exuberantly done Have a Drink on Me (1961).

The 1960s proper were now looming, bringing a change in the style of pop music that was to put an abrupt end to Donegan's career as a pop singer. But the Cockney sparrow side of his nature stood him in good stead. He had already played in pantomimes and presented his own television series, Putting on the Donegan.