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.

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.