This is part of a series of posts about the retired sailor and shanty singer Patrick Tayluer (1856-1948). Find the entire series at this link! This post is part one of an essay about Tayluer’s rendition of “The Leaving of Liverpool,” a song which became famous during the folk revival.
Richard Maitland, Patrick Tayluer and “The Leaving of Liverpool”
When collector William Main Doerflinger met retired sailor Patrick Tayluer in April 1942, the collector had recently suffered a painful loss: his good friend Richard Maitland had died that January. Maitland, also a retired sailor, was another great shanty singer from whom Doerflinger had collected many shanties and nautical songs. Doerflinger later donated most of his recordings of Maitland to the American Folklife Center archive, amounting to about 30 songs recorded between 1938 and 1940. Moreover, he recommended that Alan Lomax seek out Maitland, leading to another 38 recordings in the archive, made by Lomax in 1939. In his 1951 book, Shantymen and Shantyboys, the normally very reserved Doerflinger referred to his old friend as “loveable Dick Maitland.”
Let’s hear one of the shanties Maitland recorded for Lomax, with his commentary. This is “Paddy Get Back,” a version of the same song Tayluer called “Walk Back;” I included Tayluer’s version in the second post in this series, so you can see that version for general notes on the song. (In this version, note the amusing exchange at the end where Lomax asks Maitland to tell him where the pulling comes in a capstan shanty, only to be corrected by an indignant Maitland!)
Richard Maitland: (Spoken) It’s called ‘Paddy, Get Back!
(Sung): I was broke and out of a job in the city of London,
I went down the Shadwell docks to get a ship.
Chorus:
Paddy, get back, take in the slack,
Heave away your capstan, heave a pawl, heave a pawl!
‘Bout ship and stations there be handy,
Rise, tacks and sheets and mainsail, haul!
(Spoken): “This is a capstan shanty now….”
(Sung): There was a Yankee ship a-laying in the basin,
Oh, they told me she was going to New York. (Chorus)
If I ever lay my hands on that shipping master,
Oh, I’ll murder him if it’s the last thing that I do. (Chorus)
When the pilot left the ship way down the channel,
Oh, the captain told us we were going around cape Horn. (Chorus)
The mate and second mate belonged to Boston,
And the captain hailed fran Bangor down in Maine. (Chorus)
The three of them were rough and tumble fighters,
When not fighting amongst themselves, they turned on us. (Chorus)
Oh, they called us out one night to reef the topsails,
Now with belaying pins a-flying around the deck. (Chorus)
Oh, and we came on deck and went to set the topsails,
Not a man among the bunch could sing a song. (Chorus)
We had tinkers, we had tailors and firemen, also cooks,
And they couldn’t sing a shanty unless they had the books. (Chorus)
Oh, wasn’t that a bunch of hoodlums
For to take a ship around Cape Horn! (Chorus)
(Spoken): Now this song…I forgot to explain it in the first place…it commences…the solo is sung by the shantyman sitting on the capstan head, where he always does sing…sit in case of singing shanties. The shantyman sits there and does nothing, while the crew, walking around the capstan, are singing. The chorus begins at:
Paddy, get back, take in the slack,
Heave away the capstan, heave a pawl, heave a pawl,
‘Bout ship and stations there be handy,
Rise, tacks and sheets and mainsail, haul!
Alan Lomax: And show us where the pull…where the pulling comes….
Richard Maitland: That’s what I’m telling them now. This…’Paddy, get back’ is the chorus….
Alan Lomax: And that’s where they pull?
Richard Maitland: There’s no pullin’! It’s a capstan shanty! They’re walking around the capstan with the bars!
Among the recordings Doerflinger made of Maitland there was one song the collector felt was special: “The Leaving of Liverpool.” The song is the lyric lament of a nineteenth-century mariner who leaves his hometown of Liverpool for San Francisco, through the treacherous seas around Cape Horn. Doerflinger’s intution that this song was special proved correct: years later, based on Doerflinger’s publications, it became a major part of the folk revival, with versions and adaptations performed and recorded by everyone from the Clancy Brothers to the Kingston Trio and Ewan MacColl to Bob Dylan.
Doerflinger transcribed and published Richard Maitland’s version of “The Leaving of Liverpool” in his 1951 book Shantymen and Shantyboys. We do not have the recording, but here are Maitland’s lyrics as reported by Doerflinger:
Richard Maitland sings “The Leaving of Liverpool”
Fare you well, the Prince’s Landing Stage,
River Mersey, fare you well.
I’m off to California,
A place I know right well.
Chorus: So fare you well, my own true love,
And when I return, united we will be.
It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me
But my darling, when I think on you.
I’m off to California,
By the way of the stormy Cape Horn,
And I will send to you a letter, love,
When I am homeward bound. (Chorus)
Farewell to Lower Frederick Street,
Anson Terrace and Park Lane;
Farewell, it will be some long time
Before I see you again. (Chorus)
I’ve shipped on a Yankee clipper ship,
Davy Crockett is her name;
And Burgess is the captain of her,
And they say she’s a floating hell. (Chorus)
It’s my second trip with Burgess in the Crockett,
And I think I know him well.
If a man’s a sailor, he can get along,
But if not, he’s sure in hell. (Chorus)
The tug is waiting at the pierhead
To take us down the stream.
Our sails are loose and our anchor secure,
So I’ll bid you good-bye once more. (Chorus)
I’m bound away to leave you,
Good-bye, my love, good-bye.
There ain’t but one thing that grieves me;
That’s leaving you behind. (Chorus)
Now, fare you well, the Prince’s Landing Stage,
River Mersey, fare you well.
I’m off to California,
A place I know right well. (Chorus)
One of the things that captivated Doerflinger about “The Leaving of Liverpool” is the sense of genuine history the song imparts. In particular, the David Crockett really was commanded by Captain Burgess, and often stopped in Liverpool. Doerflinger wrote:
“The three-skysail-yarder David Crockett of New York [is] the ship mentioned in this song. Her figurehead now hangs in the Marine Museum at Mystic, Connecticut, where she went down the ways in 1853. The David Crockett often called at Liverpool on her passages homeward from California. It was in 1863 that she first arrived in the port while under command of Captain John A. Burgess of Massachusetts, her skipper for many years. In 1874, on what was to have been his last voyage before retiring from the sea, Captain Burgess was lost overboard in a storm in the South Atlantic.”
Ever since Doerflinger’s book, songbooks that reprint the song tend to include these historical tidbits about the David Crockett and Burgess.
Because the song mentions a real ship, a real captain, and a specific city, Doerflinger is able to pinpoint a very specific time frame for the song: this version must date from between 1863, the first time Burgess visited Liverpool in the Crockett, and 1874, when he died. This is a far more specific time frame than we have for most traditional songs, and amounts to pure gold for a song collector.
Soon after Maitland died, in early 1942, Doerflinger found Patrick Tayluer, and realized that, like his late friend, Tayluer had an extraordinary repertoire and an extraordinary voice. To some extent, Tayluer replaced Maitland as Doerflinger’s main consultant about shanties and other nautical songs. As I detailed in the first post in this series, Doerflinger spent two weeks in May of that year recording Tayluer. To his delight, one of the songs Tayluer sang was “The Leaving of Liverpool,” which he recorded on side A of disc 18 at those May 1942 sessions.
Unfortunately, however, there’s more to the story of Tayluer’s discs than I mentioned in my first post. Because aluminum was needed for the war effort during World War II, the discs Doerflinger used were made of lacquer coating on a glass base, and they were very fragile. Doerflinger employed a moving company to repack the discs and send them to the Library of Congress. At some point in this process of packing and shipping, several of the glass discs broke. The Presto recording machine, which he had borrowed from the Library of Congress, remained in New York with Sidney Robertson Cowell for other projects during the summer.
Two months went past uneventfully. That summer, Alan Lomax was away making a groundbreaking set of recordings in Mississippi, including the first recordings of Muddy Waters and Honeyboy Edwards, so he was not here at the Library to receive Doerflinger’s discs, listen, and copy them. Eventually, though, the package was opened and the contents surveyed by Lomax’s assistant Josephine Schwartz. In a letter sent on July 28, 1942, Schwartz informed Doerflinger of the broken discs; but she did not mention disc number 18. In the same letter, Schwartz requested that Doerflinger retrieve the recording machine from Cowell and ship it back to the Library of Congress. He dutifully did so.
On August 14, Schwartz wrote to Doerflinger again, with terrible news: “On rereading my last letter, I see that I failed to mention that no number 18 arrived in the shipment at all.” This missing recording is the one that included “The Leaving of Liverpool.”
When Doerflinger heard that this disc was missing, he was particularly dismayed. He speculated that one of the moving men must have broken the disc and removed it from the shipment to conceal the breakage. “One side of No. 18,” he wrote, “was ‘The Leaving of Liverpool,’ a very rare recording—unique, in fact—though I have the same in somewhat different form from one other seaman. Could you let me know whether a record of this song is on any of the other records. There’s a possibility of a mistake in numbering, though it was carefully done. If the song is completely lost I will get Captain Tayluer to make another copy of it.”
There was no mistake in numbering, and Doerflinger was obliged to re-record the song. Back in July the archive hadn’t expressed any particular urgency about the return of the Presto machine, and surely Doerflinger would have kept it for another week in New York if he had known that he needed to re-record “The Leaving of Liverpool.” But since Schwartz had neglected to mention the absence of this disc, he had sent it back. Because of this, he had no disc recorder to re-record the song. He proceeded by borrowing a Dictaphone, which recorded on wax cylinders, and which made recordings that were far inferior to the lacquer discs recorded on the Presto. Using this much inferior equipment, he asked Captain Tayluer to re-record not only ‘The Leaving of Liverpool,’ but the songs from the cracked discs as well. These cylinders, recorded by Doerflinger and Tayluer in August, 1942, still reside in the AFC Archive.
Immediately below, I’ll present Tayluer’s version of “The Leaving of Liverpool,” along with his spoken commentary. As we’ll see, Tayluer’s version is very different from what Doerflinger printed in Shantymen and Shantyboys. It has completely different verses and a somewhat different tune; the refrain, however, is quite close to what Maitland sang. Hear the cylinder in the player below and follow along in my transcription.
(Spoken): This is the song that was sung by the men, when they were leaving the landing stage in Liverpool. The landing stage was about half a mile long, and it would hold anything from two to three ships. And every ship that was leaving there, both with emigrants and with passengers, they all had to land on the landing stage before they went on board of a ship.
Now, this song, it originated in the year eighteen hundred and forty-nine, and it was sung with gusto by the men as they were leaving Liverpool. It was made up by a man who was leaving his sweetheart behind him, and going out to ’Frisco in search of gold maybe, and maybe to come back with the ship.
(Sung): Now I’m leaving Liverpool, bound out for ’Frisco Bay
I’m leaving my sweetheart behind me, but I’ll come back and marry you someday
Oh, when I’m far away at sea, I’ll always think of you
And today I’m leaving Liverpool and the landing stage for sea
Chorus: Singing fare you well, my own true love
When I return, united we will be
For it ain’t the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me,
But, me darling, when I thinks of you
Now I know I’ll be a long time away on this voyage to ’Frisco Bay,
We’re off to California, where there’s lots of gold today,
I’ll bring you back silk dresses, and lots of finery
I’ll bring you presents of all sorts, and my money I’ll get from the sea
Chorus
Well, I wrote a note and dropped it on the landing stage for her
Telling her that I would pray for her, God knows, when I was at sea
I’ll go about my duties, always thinking about you
And when I do return, I’ll marry you, my Sue
Chorus
And when I’m homeward bound, I’ll write you a letter and let you know that I’m coming home
And I’ll let you know what I’ve done at sea, when I am bound to you
I’ll gather all my strings in, and I hope you’ll do the same
When I’m bound back to Liverpool, you know just what I mean
Chorus
Now, a strong westerly wind, it blows us home around Cape Horn for land
We’re coming back for Liverpool, and we’ll soon be hand in hand
When I pass the light ship, oh, this prayer I’ll say for you
May God bless the two of us and our happy union prove.
Chorus
(Spoken:) Now, these warps and ropes that we used to pull in, sometimes the warps were sixteen inches thick. They were known as “grass warps” to sailors, and they were heavy. And the sailors used to lead a rope along there to the afterdeck, and back to the forecastle head through a snatch block, and that is the song they would sing.
And when the ship was clear of the wharf, that was still known as the landing stage, the tug would take hold of the ship, and take her down the river, as far as Seaforth. There the tug would let her go, and she would set all her sails, and beat on, sail on, for Holyhead. And from Holyhead, there she would make the Irish Channel, and out to sea. Which sometimes was very hard, because mostly in the Irish Channel, the winds were always easterly, so therefore, you see, it made it a lot of passes, out beating and tacking the ship, as she get down towards the Mull of Galloway. Thank you.
Patrick Tayluer’s “The Leaving of Liverpool”: An Eventful History
All of William Doerflinger’s correspondence indicates that he thought Patrick Tayluer and his version of “The Leaving of Liverpool” to be among his greatest finds as a folklore collector. Sadly, though, the loss of disc 18 from Doerflinger’s original recording session was just the beginning of a series of errors and near-misses which resulted in Tayluer’s version remaining obscure for all these years.
The arrangements under which Doerflinger recorded the cylinders remain unclear, but it seems from the later correspondence that Doerflinger used cylinders he had purchased at his own expense, and that he therefore originally owned the cylinder recordings. Since he had no cylinder player, he preferred the Library to copy the cylinders onto discs for him, and to have the Library keep the cylinders. To that end, he brought the cylinders to the Archive for copying during a business trip to Washington in 1942. The Archive passed the cylinders on to the Library’s recording lab for copying, and apparently even paid the lab’s fee. However, the Library’s equipment was being used for tasks related to the war effort, and the copies could not be made for several months. On April 5, 1943, Botkin wrote Doerflinger that, since it had been impossible to copy the cylinders, they would be returned to him by the lab.
We do not think, however, that the cylinders were returned in 1943; they’re in the archive now and there’s no evidence they ever left. It’s likely that, by the time the lab was preparing to send them, there was no obvious place for them to go; World War II was a busy time for both Doerflinger and his wife Joy, and both served overseas, William in North Africa and Italy and Joy in India. In the circumstances, it was safer to keep the cylinders at the Library until the Doerflingers were back.
The next correspondence relating to this collection occurred on January 27, 1947. Bill Doerflinger, back at his New York publishing job, was preparing the manuscript of Shantymen and Shantyboys. At that time, he wrote Rae Korson, the reference librarian at the Archive, stating that he urgently needed several songs for inclusion in the manuscript, with a deadline in spring, 1947. The songs in question included all the ones from the broken and missing discs, including Tayluer’s “The Leaving of Liverpool.” In the letter, he noted the original disc numbers, and seemed surprised that copies of those discs were not made for him along with the others. “This stymies me now,” he wrote, “since my work on the others is all finished and the missing ones are all-important.” As unlikely as it seems, in those five eventful years, Doerflinger had completely forgotten about the loss of the original discs and his subsequent need to record on cylinders. Needless to say, Korson could not find any discs that matched his description.
In June, 1948, Doerflinger realized his error, and wrote to Korson. “I had forgotten,” he explained, “that these particular songs…were not recorded on discs, but on Dictaphone cylinders.” On receipt of this letter, Korson easily found the cylinders and made disc copies. She sent them to Doerflinger on July 7, 1948—more than a year after the deadline he alluded to in 1947. In other words, Doerflinger finally did get his promised duplicates of the cylinders, but it was too late to include the songs in his book.
This makes one thing clear. Tayluer’s version of “The Leaving of Liverpool” was left out of Doerflinger’s book as a result of the unfortunate loss of the original disc. As late as January, 1947, he was intending to include it but did not actually have it, and by the time he got it back, his deadline had passed. Curiously, in the notes to the song at the back of the book, Doerflinger never even mentions that Tayluer also sang it, which contributed to the continued obscurity of Tayluer’s version.
That Doerflinger was planning to include Tayluer’s song is an important point, because there is a general belief among the few folksong enthusiasts who know of the recording that Doerflinger thought poorly of it. Dan Milner, who knew Doerflinger as an older man, has reported: “When I asked Bill about it, he simply said Captain Tayluer did not sing ‘The Leaving of Liverpool.’ Bill was a very kind, courtly man. I did not press him but I believe he was telling me that Captain Tayluer did not have a real grasp on the song and it was a matter not worth pursuing.” In fact, though Milner’s supposition is possible, it also seems possible that after an eventful fifty years, Doerflinger had simply forgotten that Tayluer had sung “The Leaving of Liverpool.” After all, he had previously forgotten the loss of several discs and the second recording session with Dictaphone cylinders, and that was after only five years had passed.
Even after he ceased to collect songs, Doerflinger continued to regard Tayluer as one of the best and most important singers he had ever recorded. In 1952, he wrote to Duncan Emrich at the Archive, “The remarkable thing about Tayluer was, despite his age, the strength and resonance of his voice–one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. Much stronger than Dick Maitland’s.”
Doerflinger’s correspondence with Emrich on this occasion ushered in another frustrating near-miss for Tayluer’s recordings. At that time, the Archive of Folk Culture had had great success releasing field recordings on long-playing records, and Emrich was planning two LPs of sea songs. Emrich, who became head of the Archive in 1945, had not been involved in any of Doerflinger’s or Lomax’s recording projects. He began his work on the LPs by simply surveying the contents of the Archive, and from this survey he selected four singers to include on the sea songs LPs: Leighton Robinson, Richard Maitland, Noble B. Brown, and John M. “Sailor Dad” Hunt. He then contacted Doerflinger, as an expert in the field, for advice. In his letter responding to Emrich, Doerflinger wrote:
“No doubt you’ve also considered the recordings of shanties and sea songs as sung by Captain Patrick Tayluer, which I made in cooperation with the Archive of American Folk-Song in 1942…. It has always seemed to me that his renditions of ‘Sacramento’ and ‘Time for Us to Leave Her’ were particularly good. […] If there is room on the record for a little descriptive background from a recording of a sailor’s words, Patrick Tayluer’s account of reefing a topgallantsail in heavy weather might be worth considering. It seemed to me very vivid, and to me was the most effective of his prose descriptions.”
Emrich responded to Doerflinger that, since Tayluer’s recordings had been done originally on Dictaphone cylinders, the sound was not good enough for them to be considered for release on the LPs. He stipulated, “If we can locate Tayluer on good discs, I would be glad to consider including him.” Doerflinger wrote back, patiently clarifying that the cylinder recordings were only a small fraction of the Tayluer material. Emrich located the disc recordings, and wrote back to Doerflinger on April 7, 1952.
By then, it was too late to re-edit the LP materials to include Tayluer; Emrich states in his letter that there was some urgency if the project was to be done by the end of the fiscal year. Still, Emrich was captivated by the old sailor’s recordings, stating, “I am really glad, however, that we did not have them to begin with, because the very high quality of his material would have pushed some of our other singers into the shade.”
Emrich therefore laid out the following plan: “As it is, we shall issue our other singers—Maitland, Robinson, Brown, Hunt—now, and then follow later with, I hope, at least two full long-playing records of Tayluer alone, including much of his descriptions of life at sea and on shore. His accounts of getting a ship underway, of setting the topsails, of boarding-house masters, and other matters are magnificent, and deserve independent issue on records.” Finally, it seemed, Tayluer was to get his due as one of the greatest shanty-singers on record.
Alas, in the end, these Tayluer LPs never came to fruition. We can only speculate as to why, as there is no further correspondence about them. Emrich remained at the Archive for less than three years after these letters were written, and it seems likely that he simply did not get around to editing the LPs before leaving. The original two LPs of sea songs, meanwhile, were among the Archive’s most successful; they were reissued on CD in 2004, and can still be purchased or heard on some contemporary streaming services. (All of Leighton Robinson’s recording can be heard on the Library of Congress website, and all of Noble Brown’s can be heard at the University of Wisconsin’s.)
All this just shows that the obscurity of Patrick Tayluer and his recording of “The Leaving of Liverpool,” can be blamed on many factors. The disappearance of the original disc—which seems to have been the fault of the shipping company—set in motion a series of events that worked against the recording’s being transcribed for Doerflinger’s book: Josephine Schwartz failed to inform Doerflinger that “The Leaving of Liverpool” was among the missing songs, and Doerflinger lost his chance to re-record it on a disc; the Library’s “war work” prevented Doerflinger’s cylinders from being copied immediately; the war also prevented the cylinders themselves from being returned to Doerflinger in 1943; and finally, Doerflinger’s own mistake in 1947, of forgetting that Rae Korson should be looking for cylinders and not discs, prevented him from having a copy in time to transcribe it for the book.
The recordings were kept from being issued on LPs by some of the same factors: the existence of cylinders in the collection confused Emrich, and that in turn was a consequence of the loss of the original disc. Before Emrich learned the truth, the deadline passed for changing the original LPs. Finally, Emrich’s departure from the Archive prevented him from pursuing a two-LP set of Tayluer’s recordings. In short, everyone involved bears a little of the blame for Patrick Tayluer’s continued obscurity—except, it seems, for Patrick Tayluer.
We’ll have more about “The Leaving of Liverpool,” including an exciting newly discovered recording, next week.