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There was no one quite like Ronnie Lane - a talented songwriter and born entertainer he would initially find fame as part of the Small Faces. He co-wrote many of their classic 60s songs and then with the Faces some of the biggest hits of the 70s. It was Ronnie Lane with Steve Marriot who would write the Faces legendary classic Ooh La La. When Ronnie went solo it would be in Ronnie's way. The Passing Show is the stuff of musical legend, born from Ronnie's love of entertaining it was a travelling musical show performed in a Big Top with associated circus performers and financed by the money Ronnie earnt from the Faces. However it wasn't a commercial success and Ronnie signed with Island Records.

As urban America of the nineteenth century grew and prospered, it became anxious to show itself civilized and "cultured" along the lines of established European culture. And so it was that the music of America's founders – the untutored but vigorous religious music of Colonial America, and the rugged, folk-derived spiritual song of the countryside – was more or less banished from polite society. The middle classes preferred (or were told to prefer) major-key hymns in "correct" four-part harmony. Funny stereopticon slides were published showing country yokels at an old-fashioned "singing school," presumably caterwauling some anthem by a disgraced eighteenth century like Billings or Read. Standard American music history texts, some even in use today, wrote off these repertoires, dismissing them in a few lines, or even ignoring them entirely.