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.