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.

Bob Dylan: Superstar in the Streets

In the 1960s a wave of British culture crashed upon the shores of the US.  All over America the sounds of British groups were blasting out of radios and a generation of US teens became swept up in the 'British Invasion'.  It was The Beatles that led the vanguard, but the trans-Atlantic traffic was not just one way.

Dylans 1966 Wolrd Tour would prove to be controversial, it was his first tour after his famous change from playing acoustic folk music to 'going electric'.  During this tour he made his second visit to Liverpool.

On 14th May1966 the bleak cobbled streets of north Liverpool became host to the 'coolest man in the world'.  In a bizarre moment the essence of swinging bohemian sixties style would meet the post-war poverty of Liverpool's urban youth.  He was due to perform that evening at the Liverpool Odeon, where he had first appeared a year previously.

Dylan and the photographer Barry Feinstein spent the afternoon before the gig wandering the austere post-war streets.  Feinstein  hated staged photoshoots and so when he stumbled upon a group of kids playing amongst the urban wasteland he realised had found the perfect photo opportunity.

Chris Hockenhall, a self-confessed 'Dylanologist', says:

 “Dylan and Feinstein just seemed to have stumbled into what amounted to a kids’ playground. It was such a clash of 1960s culture. The kids looked like Victorian street urchins and Dylan looked like a man from Mars with his loud shirt and wild hair – that’s what fascinated me.”

The streets in the photographs are eerily deserted of adults - no doubt because it was the day of the FA Cup Final, Everton vs. Sheffield Wednesday (Everton won 3-2).

It's interesting to note that the musical origins of Dylan and the Beatles seem to be exact opposites of each other.  The Beatles began as 'The Quarrymen' skiffle group, playing american folk music before moving into Rock and Roll whereas Dylan's development was the reverse.

Dylan's school yearbook claimed he: 'wanted to follow Little Richard' but by 1959 Dylan's tastes had changed.  He had given up the electric guitars and taken up banjos and harmonicas and he began digging deep into Woodie Guthrie and folk music.

Dylan seems to have a fondness for Liverpool, one wonders if this is born from his close links with the Beatles (he famously gave them their first joint!).  Only a few years ago whilst in the city Dylan took a history tour and was fascinated by John Lennons childhood bedroom in Mendips.

Perhaps though, Dylan's links with Liverpool are earlier.  A year before he met the Fab Four, Dylan wrote and recorded a song called 'Farewell' (sometimes 'Fare Thee Well').

It's tune and words are taken from 'The Leaving of Liverpool' -  a traditional folk song, well known amongst Liverpool households from the 1880 onwards.

Chris Hockenhull tracked all ten of the children down, all now grown and in their fourties, and recreated the photograph.  Amazingly non of the children remember meeting the bohemian bard.  Their grubby playground of cobblestones and bomb-shattered wastelands were a thousand miles away from the glitz of the swinging sixties.

Yet I wonder, when Dylan stood with those children on the steps of a warehouse in 1966, did he realise that most of them would've probably known the tune - if not the words to his earlier recording?

Images courtesy of