Jack Robinson - Music from a Saw

Welcome back after a long hot summer break.  Well... sort of hot.  I've spent the summer working on some exciting projects will should bear fruit shortly.  In the meantime back to blogging.

Yep, you've read the title right.  Music from a Saw.  By rubbing a bow along the side of bog-standard carpenters saw the most unusual and amazing sounds can be achieved. And there was no greater proponent of it during the 1920s and 30s than Liverpool based Jack Robinson.

Jack Robinson, from the NML collection

Jack was born in Blackpool in the late 1800s.  In the 1920s he moved to Liverpool and set up a barbers shop in Lodge Lane.  He had always been musical playing ukulele, banjo and double bass but his expertise was in the Musical Saw.

The saw was popularised in America in the early 1900s.  It's not certain when the saw came to Britain but Jack is widely considered to be the first 'professional' saw player in the country.  I think we can claim that as another Liverpool first!

Jack's Saw and Bow are now in possession of the National Museums Liverpool.  Visit their page for more info.

Now, I bet you're wondering what the saw sounds like?  Think of a large tuba, ok... well it sounds nothing like that.  It actually has a sort of ethereal otherworldly sound  - like a modern Theremin.

Sadly no known recordings of Jack Robinson exist although during his time he played alongside great orchestras and in a solo performance on the RMS Duchess of York.

Here is Austin Blackburn (not a scouser) considered to be a modern Musical Saw maestro.

Bonus question: There was a famous Hollywood diva, a mega-star of the silver screen who was herself an accomplished Musical Saw player.  Who was she?

Keep Streets Live - Victory.. of sorts!

Following on from my previous (here and here) posts it has been announced today that controversial Liverpool City Council policy to charge buskers to pay and regulate when and where they can play has been thrown out.

Although they don't admit it i'm pretty sure this has quite a bit to do with the KEEP STREETS LIVE campaign which achieved over 5000 signatures to support it.

Councillor Steve Munby admitted: “The policy wasn't thought through properly and we ought to have realised at the time. “Many of the regulations as they stood, were unenforceable. We had no team in place, no officers to go around checking people. I hold my hands up and admit that on this occasion, we got it wrong.” 

But he refused to admit defeat: "I haven't seen a busking community behind it, just one or two very loud voices."

I don't think it has occurred to Cllr Munby that one or two voices can speak for many.  Saying that, it's hard to believe that any politician thinks that they speak for anybody but themselves.

See their report from this years Wash Out Mathew Street Festival.

Does this Train Stop on Merseyside

Ok, technically not "Beneath the Beat" as it was a charting pop-song but I think in the context of last weeks revelations I can be excused.

Written by Liverpool artist Ian Prowse of the band Amsterdam. It riffs off ideas and images that anyone from Liverpool can easily recognise. It is a song that is just so 'Liverpool' a complex celtic tapestry of history, emotion and place.

 It is not quite a celebratory song and indeed the last verse is particularly harrowing.

Can't concieve what those children done 
Guess theres a meaness in the soul of man 
Yorkshire policemen chat with folded arms 
While people try and save their fellow fans


I'll just give a brief quotation from the lyrics as there is a better deconstruction of the song here: http://aliverpoolfolksongaweek.blogspot.co.uk/


The song encapsulates so much about Liverpool... a real trip through the psychography of the city and its people.


JFT96

Italian Festival and Ukulele Uff and Lonesome Dave

Have you noticed the recent revival in ukulele music?  Well Liverpool is not left out as we have just sent forth to worthy emissaries over to the Italian Coldogno Music Festival to show them how Scousers do it.

For many years the humble uke has been relegated to the position of a novelty instrument, fit only for people like Tiny Tim and George Formby Tribute acts.  

At one time though, the uke was a stalwart of the Liverpool music scene - especially that which takes place under the radar of the mainstream music. 

From the pre-war jazz of the music halls to the skiffle boom that led to The Beatles the uke played its part.  

Indeed, George Harrison mentioned many times his love for the uke and the proliferation of new ukulele players covering 'Whilst by Guiar Gently Weeps' and 'My Sweet Lord' shows that his passion was not just a one way street.

It seems the time has come around again to produce more Ukulele loving talents; perhaps talents is too mild a word because in the short space of a few months these chaps has gone from playing in pubs and busking at Matthew Street to performing on stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall the internationally renowned Caldogno Ukulele Festival in Italy.  

Not to mention another festival over in Dublin later in the year.

Ukulele Uff and Lonesome Dave have taken the musical world by storm.  Check out their unique musical talent performing on stage at the Phil.

I'm sure we will hear lots more of these chaps in the future.

Freddie Mercury - The Liverpool Years

Liverpool has seen its fair share of exotic characters and transient musos.

It's a little known fact that Freddie Mercury (under his real name, Farrokh Bulsara) made his first on-stage debut with Brian May and Roger Taylor at Liverpool's famous: 'The Sink Club' - now known as  The Magnet.  


The original membership card to gain entry to the sink club was by a numbered rubber plug on a chain.


Here is a bootleg recording of Freddie with the short-lived Liverpool band Ibex taken at the The Sink Club.  

There is another Liverpool link:  this one ties the Beatles to Queen.


Rumour has it, that Freddie once lived on Penny Lane. 
It's a popular story that Freddie once lived in Dovedale Towers - now a pub.
If anyone has any images of Freddie in Liverpool i'd love to see them.

Keep Streets Live - Church Street Mass Busk 2

Following on from yesterdays post I took myself down into the city centre to witness the 'Keep Streets Live' mass busk.

It was a great turnout with a diverse group of musicians and instruments, guitars, violins, drums a trumpet and a digeridoo... one percussionist even began drubbing a beat on the street furniture.

Remember, please sign this petition: http://keepstreetslive.com/

One notable absence was the groups of eastern European musicians who can often be heard with trumpets and accordions.  Perhaps they were not aware of this new legislation?

If it wasn't for the Keep Streets Live campaign I wouldn't know about the full scope of this legislation.  Although it has been announced in the Echo and other news sources I was not aware that the legislation would also effect non-musician street performances such as street art (see the painting below) and the chap with the little owl.  The council has said very little has been said about these types of street performance.

In between songs, the musicians would give their opinions on the forthcoming legislation and one comment in particular struck me: 'It's our city, not theirs.'


As I hope the image above shows, the crowd that gathered was a great mix of young and old.  It was so typically representative of Liverpool.  Old guys stumbling from the Beehive to the Blob Shop stopped to roll a fag and enjoy an acoustic version of Jessie J's 'Price Tag' then a few minutes later a group of tweenagers start tapping their feet to 1920s classic 'Minnie the Moocher'.

Each one of those people stopped of their own free will to be entertained. If they didn't like the music, they simply walked away.

It was music by all sorts of people for all sorts of people.  They were not asked to be there, many didn't know just why they were there... but they stayed.


Meanwhile, a hundred yards away River Island was still blasting out its speakers.

Remember, please sign this petition: http://keepstreetslive.com/

Keep Streets Live - Mass Busk in Liverpool

As I posted a few months ago, Liverpool City Council are proposing a license in order for people to busk.  (See here: http://beneaththebeat.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/beat-of-street.html)

These new rules are deemed by most buskers to be overtly restrictive and a threat against the spontaneity and vitality of street performance.

To that end the  KEEP STREETS LIVE campaign has been petitioning the council to re-think their decision.

Sign the petiton HERE.

Furthermore they will be promoting a MASS BUSK in an unofficial launch party for this new legislation.  The Busk will be in Liverpool City Centre today at 12pm.

See you there.

Newton Faulkner - Clouds

Ok, he's not a Liverpool artist but Newton Faulkner's new video really shows you Liverpool from a different angle.

The technique is called tilt-shift and makes real photographs and films look as if they were scale models.  It's cool to see Liverpool like a Hornby Train set.

City in Minutes - Harp Music

Here is a great video which by itself is striking.  With the added dimension of Liverpool harpist Stan Ambrose the video is really lifted to soaring heights of beauty and elegance.

Enjoy.

Al Jolson and Liverpool

It has recently been mooted that Liverpool should have a National Migration Centre, sort of like a British Ellis Island.  For nine million people the Liverpool waterfront would be their last view of the grim Old World. 

Many of those emigrants were fleeing poverty and persecution.  They were not just from Britain but from all over Europe.  In 1894 a young Lithuanian family arrived in Liverpool on their way to begin a new life in America.   The family, Naomi Yoelson and three young children had ridden on hay wagons, trains and packet steamers to reach Liverpool where they would board a grand ocean liner to take them to New York.

'RMS Umbria' - the Cunard liner that took the Yoelson family to America.

They must have been anxious, the father Rabbi Mosel Reuben Yoelson had already reached America in 1891 and had been saving money so he could afford to bring his family over with him.  Times had been hard and it had taken four years before he could afford it.

Whilst waiting for passage in Liverpool, Naomi let her children wander the teeming cobbled streets full of sailors, entertainers (like Seth Davy), hawkers, costermongers, prostitutes and the human detritus that so characterised 19th century Liverpool.  Her youngest child, eight year old Asa Yoelson was fascinated by the street life of the city and the day before they were due to board the Cunard ship 'RMS Umbria' he wandered off and got lost.  Naomi was distraught. 

'A young Asa Yoelson'

Luckily no harm came to young Asa, a policeman returned him.  Little did that policeman know that the young Jewish emigrant he had helped would become one of the greatest stars of film and stage in history.

The young Asa and his brother would perform on street corners for coins which they would then spend on buying theatre tickets.  It would be years before Asa Yoelson became 'Al Jolson - The Worlds Greatest Entertainer'.

Did the star of stage and film remember his brief time in Liverpool?  

Later in his career, when filming the seminal film 'The Jazz Singer' a Liverpuddlian would enter the story.  George Groves a Lancashire lad who studied at Liverpool University would become a pioneer of sound recording and so impressed Jolson that he dubbed him 'the quiet little Englishman' and insisted he recorded all his later pictures. 

 Liverpool was the greatest emigration port in the world and it is no wonder that many prominent Americans can trace their origins through Liverpool at one time or another.

A Flock of Seagulls playing... A Flock of Seagulls

Here is a new advert using the music from the Liverpool New Wave band 'A Flock of Seagulls'.

Its a pity A Flock of Seagulls faded out as quickly as they did but their music really captures the time they were writing.  That period was in the early 1980s when music videos were coming to the fore and new production techniques were being pioneered.

Who can listen to their hit: 'Space Age Love Song' and not hear the foetal glimmers of Britpop and 90s Indie?
A great song for a lovely sunny day!

Jacqui and Bridie

Apologies for the brief hiatus, I was up a mountain in Morocco and blogging at 13,000 feet is no mean task.

I remember as a child being fascinated by the turntable on my parent hi-fi system.  We didn't actually have many LP discs (my dad being an ultra cool trendy 1980s guy had ditched them all in favour of tapes) but my mum had a small collection of folk music.

One disc in particular was a favourite of mine, had a cover of two ladies standing by the famous Peter Pan statue in Sefton Park, Liverpool (a copy of the one in London).  Their names were Jacqui and Bridie and they were Britains first female folk duo.


They ran a Folk Club in Liverpool in the 1960s, no mean feat considering the male dominated folk and pub scene at the time.

Sadly, Bridie passed away a few years ago and last year after 50 years Jacquie held the final Folk Club.

Whatever you think of their style and music they were a formidable presence in the Liverpool folk revival.  A two part documentary 'Pink and Pleasant Land' was filmed as part of the final Folk Club and I think it paints a fitting tribute to two figures that broke the mould.

The album is now quite rare, it was called 'Hello Friend' and if anyone has it i'd love to get a copy.

Not Only Bootleg But Also Not Beatles

Whilst travailing the backwaters of the internet in search of snippets for this blog, I came across the claim that there was an unreleased Beatles bootleg recording, done around 1967 of a song called 'The L.S. Bumblebee'.

I duly listened to it and wasn't convinced.  The Beatles influences where there, sitar drone, hallucinogenic lyrics etc... but it didn't sound like The Beatles.  Sure enough after a little bit of searching I discovered it was performed by none other than Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

Cook and Moore are widely considered the most influential comedy act ever.  They spearheaded the satire boom of the 1960s and paved the way from everything from the Pythons to The Mighty Boosh.

I duly YouTube'd and found this extract from the series Not Only... But Also... showing the full L.S. Bumblebee sketch - keep an eye out for the surprise guest in the segment following the song!

John Lennon appeared no fewer than three times in Not Only... But Also...  in 1964, 1965 and 1966.  I'm still trying to find out his relationship with Cook and Moore but obviously it was more than just a casual acquaintanceship.  

The Beatles has performed in comedy before, most notably with Ken Dodd and Morecambe and Wise but this was as an ensemble.  Was Lennon's relationship with Cook and Moore more personal?  I can easily imagine Lennon's acerbic humour chiming with the satire, surrealism and musical comedy of Cook and Moore.

Whether Lennon personally had any influence on the LS Bumblebee song itself is doubtful, but in a time when  great performers are too often pigeon-holed into one area or another it is good to remind ourselves that crossovers in the 1960s were more common and often surprising than you'd think.

Whitechapel - NEMS bites the dust.

Here are two photographs of the same building, a building that for a time was the centre of Liverpool music business - here 'the most important contract in music history' was signed.

 And 40 years later... demolished for redevelopment.

Photo from PhillipGMayer

It shows the NEMS (standing for North End Music Stores) building on Whitechapel, Liverpool.  


Legend has it that At about three o'clock on October 28th, 1961, a boy called Raymond Jones, walked into 
this NEMS record-store in and asked:


 'There's a record I want. It's "My Bonnie" and it was made in Germany. Have you got it?'

Behind the counter was the store manager, Brian Epstein. 

He shook his head. 'Who is the record by?' he asked. 

'You won't have heard of them,' said Jones. 'It's by a group called The Beatles....'

Whether the story is true or not, it was from this building where Brian began his music empire signing The Beatles and going on to manage some of the biggest bands of Merseybeat.

The building is now gone but i'm sure the legend will live on.

Thanks to Phillip G Mayer, check his photostream of Liverpool photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/44435674@N00/

New Logo

A good friend of ours has made this snazzy headline for the blog.  Now if I can only work out how to get it up on blogger!

The Beat of the Street

This blog aims to be about the more obscure, uncelebrated and forgotten music history of Liverpool.

There is no aspect of music history more forgotten and uncelebrated than the art of busking.  It's one of the oldest types of performance, from the moment a cave man first picked up a bone-flute there was probably a crowd around him throwing brightly coloured stones at his feet.

The sheer amount and quality of buskers in Liverpool at the moment is staggering, from the top of Bold Street to bottom of Lord Street - less than a mile there were about 10 of them.

A musical mile. 17th March 2012. Liverpool

It is claimed by the council that this is too many.  There are plans afoot to start charging buskers for one of 25 slots in the city centre.  Charges should be around £20 per anum.  Is this needed regulation, or simply a cynical money spinner for the cash-strapped council?

My worry is that with only a limited number of pitches there will be very tight competition and newer artists may never get the permit to perform.

Some of the proposed busking spots?  Are there enough?

They've always lived in a strange nether-world between professional and amateur, some buskers make a living through selling high-quality CDs from the pavement, others are barely able to hold a guitar.  Buskers in all their varied mixes give a colour and depth to a street that would otherwise be missing.  Let's hope this charging scheme doesn't affect it too much.

Thank god they're still here!

Clean Bandit

This blog is primarily about music history, the last few posts have been deep into that history. 

As i'm firmly of the opinion that history is merely what's happened today viewed from tomorrow I thought i'd show you that i'm not just stuck in the past.

Let me give you a brief heads up on a band with Liverpool connections that I think deserve a promo.

Clean Bandit, are an up-and-coming London based electro-classical ensemble. 

Yep, you heard, Electro-Classical, smooth electro beats based around a string quartet core.  It's not just a novelty, the band are drenched in classical music knowledge - just check out their single 'Mozart's House'.

Their main man and drummer are from just over the water.  Birkenhead born Jack ("Wandeck") and Luke Patterson are part of the driving force behind the most refreshing sounds i've heard for a while.  

Their latest single, UK Shanty, could be equally set in the coves of Cornwall or on the expansive Seaforth foreshore where seagulls dodge Gormleys in watercolour sunrises.

If the success of their first musical forays are anything to go by, they'll soon be finding their path etched into the flagstones of musical history and perhaps become another band irrepressibly linked to Liverpools dynamic music scene.

Skipping a Beat 1 - Mysterious Ladies and Curly Haired Sailors

Whilst viewing many old black and white documentaries about Liverpool it struck me how often the images were of children playing in the streets, accompanied by songs.

 Skipping games seem to have their own traditional music and tunes.

From one generation to the next, skipping and playground songs seem to sustain themselves.    I imagine if photographers and film-makers were allowed they would find that similar songs are being sung at skipping games nowadays as were being sung 100 years ago.


As a type of tradition music it's overlooked but when analysed gives us a window into class, religion and the concerns and worries of peoples every day lives.


It's widely believed that 'Ring o'Roses' is a song about plague and disease, whilst 'I like an apple and I like a pear' is really a song about the hardships of marriage to a unsuitable husband.

O I like an apple and I like a pear

And I like a sailor with nice curly hair

O gee I love 'im, I can't deny it

I'll be with him wherever he goes

He stands on the corner and whistles me out

He shouts Oo-ey, oo-ey, are you coming out? 

O gee I love 'im, I can't deny it

I'll be with him wherever he goes

He bought me a shawl of red, white and blue 

And when we got married he tore it in two 

O gee I love 'im, I can't deny it

I'll be with him wherever he goes

Many women dreamed of a marriage to a nice sailor!

There are more sinister versions of this song, probably not sung by children but no doubt well known:

Before I got married I wore a black shawl
But now that I'm married I wear bugger-all
Still, I love him, can't deny him
I will be with him where ever he goes

Before I got married I'd sport and I'd play
But now, how the cradle stands in my way
Still, I love him, can't deny him
I will be with him where ever he goes

Another one has a casual mixture of contemporary references and ethnic identity.

Micky mouse is dead

He died last night in bed

He cut his throat

With a ten pound note

And this is what he said

Red white and blue

Me mother was a jew

Me father was an Irishman

And out goe's you

There are a certain number of set tunes or variations of tunes that seem well known right across the world.  It would be impossible for us to tell where songs originally came from but we can assume that the hundreds of children that passed through the 'Gateway of Empire' that was Liverpool brought their own traditions and songs with them.


These songs are not specific to Liverpool, but they were very common here especially songs involving handsome sailors and beautiful maidens. 

Sometimes life was better in the old songs...

 It is telling that in a port city where men would often be absent for weeks on end and women were left to fend for themselves and their families the romantic ideal of a nice sailor coming home with the bounty of the world for his girl would have a strong resonance.


It's no surprise that the innocent girls who sang these songs would later become the tough and hardy matriarchs that seemed to rule Liverpools streets and alleys with iron fists.


Do you have any songs that you remember from childhood? 

       

The Singing City

Today, as following the themes of recent posts i'm going to look at music in the context of urban regeneration.

In 1965, during the midst of the great urban renewal where the Victorian slums of northern Liverpool were bulldozed wholesale the BBC sent a documentary crew to Liverpool.

The premise of this documentary was:

"How urban regeneration tore the heart out of the Singing City."

The documentary hosts interviews with dockers, priests, seamen and even the famous police constable 'Herbert Balmer'.   The highlight for me are the rare interviews with the women who kept the communities together when the men were away at sea. 

 For anyone who pines for the 'good old days' before they knocked the slum terraces down these interviews are a stark reminder of the utter deprivation, poverty and danger that haunted those terraces and tenements.

Listening to the stories of these people, it if difficult to believe that such poverty was still prevalent into the second half of the 20th Century.

This bleak image is constantly undercut by the use of music which is central to the film. Typical folksongs of the era are present in abundance (inclduing live recordings of Pete McGovern in local pubs) and even more remarkable is the recording of the childrens songs, sung on countless playgrounds.

These childrens playground songs and rhymes seem to echo through the ages but are held up to contrast with images of children in the same streets singing American blues music 'The Wood-chopping Blues'.  

This documentary really shows the birth of the modern world where children still have to sleep in houses infested by damp and rats yet the police were deploying CCTV in the city centre (30:00 mins).

Britains first CCTV cameras?  Liverpool 1965, showing the Metropolitan Cathedral half-built.

Was this the first use of CCTV in the UK?

You can watch the documentary here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/mersey/5183.shtml

'There are no folk in the whole world so helpless and so wise, their is hunger in their bellies, and laughter in their eyes'.

Liverpool - An Altered Town

 One familiar with the city cannot help but look around Liverpool today and be astounded by the changes of the past decade.  The transformation of the city centre from the damp, drab and disintegrated (or perhaps disintegrating) concrete wasteland to the vibrant flowing modern city is a lesson in how to do town planning right!

However, you will always get people who yearn for yesterday.  People who think that the grass was always greener before (even if that grass was was the 1970s Pier Head *shudder*).

Regardless of whether these decisions have been seen out to be right or wrong, they have always acted as a catalyst for commemoration - often through the medium of folksong.

Liverpools latest transformation is just one of a series of massive changes that have altered the city - the first major change was the building of the Old Dock in the 1710s, without that we would not have Bold Street and the ropewalks area for they were built on the old wasteland heath over 'the pool' (below).

Map of location of the Old Pool on a mid-victorian town plan.

The Old Dock itself succumbed to the progress of commerce and civility and was filled in and by 1828 was the site of John Foster's magnificent Customs House (below).

This magnificent building stood until the actions of the Luftwaffe left it a burnt-out ruin, it was pulled down shortly after the war.

We look at it as a beautiful symbol of neoclassical grandeur at the hight of the Georgian period.
The people of Liverpool in the 1830s didn't necessarily see it that way.

This song; 'Liverpool's an Altered Town' seems astounding to us today but it really shows how the town changed between the 1700s and the 1800s.  It lists a number of churches that have been erected, how the old dock was filled in, how St Thomas's church spire was pulled down (neglecting to mention it was so high and jerry-built that it used to visibly sway in high winds!).

St Thomas's Church, before and after it's spire

What is even more fascinating is that this same tune was adapted to form a song that had the exact opposite sentiments, compare these two stanzas.

Liverpool is an Altered Town - 1830

"The spire of famed St Thomas's"      

"That long had stood the weather"

"Although it was so very high, they've downed it all together"

"And the Old Dock the poor Old Dock"

"The Theme of many a sonnet"

"They've pulled it up and now have built a customs house upon it"

Liverpool is Improving Daily - 1828

"Once Old Dock was so strangely fixt"

"The streets seemed not connecte'd"

"There ships and houses oddly mix'd, now a grand Customs House erected"

"What glorious sights on Kings Birthday"

"The ladies gay and music play"

"With all the Clubs so fine array'd, and Mr Mayor the first stone laid."

One song seems mired in misplaced nostalgia (the old dock the theme of sonnets?) and the other mired by jingoism and blatant civic boasting.

These songs, although in the folk tradition are not really folk songs.  The first one 'Liverpool is Improving Daily' was written in 1828 specifically for the grand procession to lay the foundation of the Customs House. It is basically a piece of spin, PR and propaganda.

The second song 'Liverpool is an Altered Town' was printed by John Harkness of Preston as a 'Broadside Ballad'.  These were printed in their hundreds, they were very popular and were often sold by pedlars and street-hawkers throughout the country.  There were not about collecting and preserving folk songs, but rather selling cheap-diversionary ephemera. 

 It is telling of where Mr Harkness's priorities lie that in his catalogue he also had ballad such as: "Preston is an Altered Town" and "Manchester is an Altered Town".

Dirty Old Towns

Following my last post numerous people have asked where 'Bevington Bush' was. 





 It was located on the west side of Scotland Road, just north of Leeds Street.  The area has changed massively. All the crowded slums and  enormous brick warehouses were swept away in the 1960s  to create the rather bland mish-mash of 1970s council houses and perimeter fenced private developments.


When a city undergoes great changes it is often a catalyst for the creation of songs that reflect that change.  In my last post I posted 'Beggars Bush' replaced 'Bevington Bush' when the song was sung in Ireland, moving the area from Liverpool to Dublin.  A similar thing has happened with the song 'Dirty Old Town' - I have heard it attributed to describing Manchester, Dublin, Belfast, Derry and Liverpool.


The reality is that the song was written in 1949 by Ewan MacColl about the town of Salford.  The song was written amongst the bleak post-war streets of industrial England and although often thought of as a sentimental song is really about the welcome destruction of the 'Dirty Old Town' as the lyrics show:

"I'm gonna make me a big sharp axe

Shining steel tempered in the fire

I'll chop you down like an old dead tree

Dirty old town

Dirty old town"

Dirty Old Town is perhaps an atypical folk song. Most folk-songs celebrate the past and embrace sentimentality even to the point of mawkishness.  


In my next few posts I am intending to explore the idea of songs as a reaction to the changes in Liverpool's urban environment.  I will be discussing the BBC documentaries created about post-war Liverpool and the folk revival of the 1960s but I will start with a song from the 1830s called: 'Liverpool is an Altered Town'.

Wishing it was a Sunday - Seth Davy

The picture below is a fascinating thing for me.  At first glance it seems to be one of those Victorian street urchin pictures of Liverpool which seem to be ten-a-penny.  It was discovered by Matthew Edwards and posted on the 'Liverpool Folk Song a Week Blog'.

In it, a group of children gather around an old black man.  If you look closely you can see that the man is sitting with a thin plank of wood sticking out in front of him.  On the plank are three 'jig-dolls', dancing.

The year is sometime before 1902, the place is a long-since altered area of Liverpool known as Bevington Bush.  The cobbled streets and brick walls seem as far removed from a 'bush' as one can imagine, but for hundreds of years this was a small but well known hamlet of Liverpool.

So often these types of pictures are anonymous faces, but the old man with the dolls can be easily identified.  His name was Seth Davy and he has a remarkable musical legacy.

In the 1960s Glyn Hughes wrote a beautiful lilting tune called The Ballad of Seth Davy.

You can hear a lovely version of the song here:

The Dubliners, also did a version which replaced the 'Bevington Bush' with the area of Dublin 'Beggars Bush'. Such things often happen in folk music, which I think is great in showing the universality of the themes covered. 

On a personal note, my grandmother, a Scottie Road girl used to tell me about Seth Davy.  She didn't remember him but her father did.  He told her that as good as the Ballad was, it was wrong.  Seth Davy more likely drank whiskey all the week and buttermilk on a Sunday!

There may be some truth in this, Seth Davy used to sing the old minstrel songs from American south.  One of them, "Massa Am Old Stingey Man" includes the lyrics: - 

"Come day, go day,

I wish in my heart 'twas Monday;

I drink good whiskey all de week,

And butter-milk on Sunday."

Who was Seth Davy? A black street-artist who knew the old American minstrel songs?  He was a star of Liverpool in his day, known and photographed.  Yet we know nothing of him, West Indian, West African, Jamaican have all been proposed as origins.  Was he an escaped slave, fled 'cross the Atlantic?  History remains silent - as silent as his dolls are now.