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 British 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 Beggars Bush, Dublin or Shepherd's Bush in London from the original Bevington Bush in Liverpool.^[1] 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.^[2]

But there is evidence supporting Seth Davy's existence, or at least the existence of the man he was based on. Fritz Spiegl possessed a lantern slide clearly showing a poor black street entertainer with 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. Merseyside Biography Pages also say that he was a West African man, identify Sierra Leone as his birthplace and that his name was George Smart not Seth Davy.^[2] 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 there could have been a Seth Davy from Jamaica in Liverpool at that time.^[3] A correspondent to the Liverpool Echo in 1957, claimed he was from Port Antonio in Jamaica.^[4]

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'"