Seth Davy

Seth Davy, sometimes spelled Seth Davey, was a black street entertainer who worked in Liverpool, England, at the turn of the 20th century, and was immortalised in the folk song "Whiskey on a Sunday".

Little is known of Davy outside of the lyrics of the song, which themselves have been varied over the years, with his location sometimes even changed to Dublin (Beggar's Bush) or London (Shepherd's Bush) from the original Bevington Bush in Liverpool. No one is recorded in public records with the precise name of Seth Davy. This vagueness had led to the assumption that the character was imaginary, although many Liverpudlians claimed to have seen him in person.

But Seth Davy certainly existed. Fritz Spiegl possessed a lantern slide clearly showing a poor black street entertainer with three jig dolls at Bevington Bush, surrounded by children. Popular belief is that Seth Davy was West Indian, possibly Jamaican, though Ray Costello in his Black History, a history of Liverpool's black population, says that he was West African. Planters from Devon, England are known to have introduced the surname Davy into Jamaica. The existence of the Davy surname amongst black Jamaicans supports the belief that Seth Davy was from Jamaica.

Davy sang 'Massa is a stingy man', from the repertoire of Dan Emmett, one of the stars of American minstrelsy, which contains the lines:

"Sing come day, go day
God send Sunday
We'll drink whiskey all de week
And buttermilk on Sunday'"

Seth Davy at Bevington Bush, Liverpool (from a lantern slide, circa 1900)

A Liverpool folksong a week, blogspot

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