I'll tell you the line that does me in every single time. It's not the harbour and it's not the parting itself. It's "but my darling when I think of thee." That's it. That's the whole thing. A man on a boat, looking back, naming the one person he's leaving, and the leaving isn't of a girl really — it's of a whole life, a whole town, a whole everything.
This is a sad song. I want that out of the way early. It dresses itself up as a sailor's farewell, jaunty enough to clap along to in a pub, but it is in its bones a song about going away and not knowing if you'll come back. And lads, there are a LOT of those in the Irish and the wider trad canon. We are a people who left. My own great-grandfather went and came home and went again, and nobody in the family fully knows the order of it.
But here's the thing about The Leaving of Liverpool that I love and that not everyone clocks straight away — it names a real ship. By name. The David Crockett. (Sometimes you'll hear "Davy.") And that ship was REAL. It was an American sailing packet, a big square-rigged thing, and it ran between New York and Liverpool and round the Horn to California in the gold-rush years and after. So this isn't a vague poetic boat. Some sailor sang the name of his actual berth.
And the captain too. "And the captain's name was Burgess." That was also a real man — Captain Burgess commanded the David Crockett for a good long stretch in the 1860s and 70s, and by the accounts I've dug up he was a hard driver of a ship, the sort who got fast passages out of her. So when the singer in the song says he's signed on under Burgess, that lands differently when you know Burgess was a name a Liverpool sailor would actually have recognised. It's a bit like if a song today named a specific budget airline and a specific pilot. The realness is the whole point.
Here's a gas thing, and I'll be honest it stopped me in my tracks when I first read it properly. The song is OF Liverpool, English city, Mersey and all that — and yet it survives mostly because it was collected in AMERICA. The version most of us sing comes down through the collector Doerflinger, who took it down from an old sailor in the early-mid 20th century, and it threaded back into the folk revival from there. So an English emigration song, sung by Irish singers all over the world, preserved by an American. That's the whole story of trad in one little knot, isn't it. Nobody owns these songs. They just travel, same as the people in them.
I should say — there's a fair argument the singer is Irish himself, just shipping out of Liverpool because that's where the work and the boats were. Liverpool was THICK with Irish in those years. Half the city, some said. So a Clare man or a Mayo man going to Liverpool to catch a ship to New York is not a stretch at all. That's maybe why we've taken the song so fully to heart over here, despite it being an English town's song. We were on those docks too.
Now I'll contradict myself a little, because I always do. For all that I called it sad — when you sing it WELL, in a room, with a few voices coming in on "fare thee well," it doesn't feel like grief exactly. It feels like company. Which is the strange magic of a farewell song. You sing about being alone and you do it together. You can read the full words and the history over on the Leaving of Liverpool song page if you want them in front of you.
The trick with singing it, if I can offer one thing — don't rush it and don't milk it. There's a temptation, with a song this tender, to go all weepy and slow it to a crawl. Resist. The sailors who sang it were working men, not poets feeling sorry for themselves. Keep it moving, keep it plain, let the words do the work. The sorrow is built in. You don't need to add any.
It sits, for me, on the same shelf as The Parting Glass — that family of songs you sing when something is ending. End of an evening, end of a chapter, end of a road. We did a whole farewell songs dig once and Liverpool kept elbowing its way in. It belongs there. A goodbye that names its ship.
Sing it for someone who left. Everyone has one.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat hates a packed suitcase. HATES it. Sits on it, won't move, gives you a look. I've decided he's just a fella who doesn't believe in anyone leaving. Sound man. We agree on the important things.