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.
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