'A West Indian? You must be joking! I come out of the East End': Kenny Lynch and English racism in the 1950's and 1960s'

Abstract

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.