Eugene Dunphy connects Jamaica, Liverpool and Dublin to a Number One hit

 

In September 1967, music reviewers held out great hopes for a ballad that had just been released on the Tribune label. Produced by Jack Bayle and featuring a honky-tonk piano and drums, ‘Whiskey on a Sunday’ commemorated the life of Seth Davey, and it was sung by a twenty-seven-year-old Dubliner, Danny Doyle.

Climbing steadily up the Irish charts, by the third week of October the ballad had reached the Number One spot, a position it was to retain for the next ten weeks. People were now asking, ‘Who was Seth Davey?’

On the 7th of August 1957, the Liverpool Echo published an informative and fascinating letter from William Ashcroft Braley, an elderly man who lived on Gilman Street in Liverpool. Braley had a lot to say about Seth Davey, describing him as a street entertainer who put on dancing doll shows for children at the corner of Bevington Bush, about two miles from Gilman Street.

Seth, who sported a distinctive grey beard and a black hat, lived in a small flat ‘in Liver Street, between Maguire Street and Ford Street, off Vauxhall Road’. He was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and ‘died between 1902 and 1905’, and was well known for reciting a particular chant, which went as follows: ‘Come day, go day, I wish in my heart it was Sunday; Drinking buttermilk all the week, but whiskey on a Sunday’.

Further investigation reveals that Seth’s ‘come day, go day’ chant was highly influenced by the chorus of a ‘minstrel song’ which was popular in New York theatres in the 1850s.

Called ‘Massa is a Stingy Man’, the lyrics were included in the 1854 work Singing for the Nation, published in New York by Richard Marsh, the chorus reading as follows: ‘Sing come day, go day, God send Sunday; We’ll drink whiskey all the week, and buttermilk on Sunday’.

Liverpool historian and folklorist, Glyn Hughes (1932-1972), was so captivated by the story of ‘the dancing doll man’ that in the late 1950s he penned a ballad called ‘Seth Davey’, the chorus of which featured all the words of Seth’s ‘come day, go day’ chant. An amazing image showing Seth surrounded by children in Bevington Bush was unearthed some years ago (see left).

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own