Some songs you sing for the joy of them. This one you sing because it nearly didn't make it.
The Leaving of Liverpool is a sailor saying goodbye. To a girl, to a town, to dry land — to the whole life he's leaving behind as the ship pulls out for California. And the heartbreak of it, the thing that gets me every single time, is that it isn't even really about the leaving. It's about the COMING BACK. Listen to the chorus. "It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, but my darling when I think of thee." He's already homesick for a home he hasn't left yet. That's a sailor for you. That's a person for you.
I'll be straight with you before we go any further. This song is precious to me partly because of HOW we still have it, which I'll get into below, and once you know that, singing it feels different. It feels like minding something. Like keeping a candle lit in a draughty room.
A Bit of History
Right. Here's the part where I have to be careful and honest, because the history of this one is genuinely a near miss.
For most of its life The Leaving of Liverpool was almost invisible. It's a sailor's song, a forebitter — that's the name for the songs sailors sang off-watch, for themselves, not the work chanties they heaved ropes to. And forebitters didn't get written down much. Nobody was collecting the private goodbyes of working men.
What we have comes down to us, in the main, from ONE source. An American folklorist named William Main Doerflinger collected it in the early-to-mid twentieth century from an old sailor — a retired seaman by the name of Richard Maitland, who'd been at sea in the age of sail and was living out his last years in a sailors' home on Staten Island. Doerflinger sat with old salts like Maitland and took down what they could still remember. And from that — from one old man's memory, given to one collector who happened to be listening — comes very nearly the whole song as we sing it.
Think about how thin that thread is. If Doerflinger doesn't make that trip. If Maitland's memory had failed on the verses. If nobody writes it down. The song is just GONE, sunk without trace, the way thousands of forebitters genuinely did vanish when the men who knew them died. We very, very nearly lost this one entirely.
Now — I won't pretend it sprang from nowhere. The song clearly grew out of the great age of emigration, when ships left Liverpool packed for America and Australia, and a sailor leaving on a Yankee clipper bound for California (the song names the Davis, a real type of vessel, and a hard "bucko" mate) was a true picture of the times. Roughly mid-1800s in feel, in other words. But I'll not hand you a precise date and pretend it's certain, because it isn't. What's certain is the rescue. The song was hanging by a thread, and it got caught.
There's a sweet irony in the rest of the story. After it was collected, it was the singing of it — by the great revival folk groups of the 1960s, who carried it round the world — that pulled it back from the edge for good. A song that nearly died in one old man's memory is now sung in pubs from Ennis to Boston. That's the whole thing about folk music in one song, isn't it. It only survives if somebody keeps singing it.
Lyrics
Fare thee well to Prince's Landing Stage, River Mersey, fare thee well. I am bound for California, A place I know right well.
So fare thee well, my own true love, For when I return, united we will be. It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, But my darling when I think of thee.
I am bound to California By way of the stormy Cape Horn, And I'll write to you a letter, love, When I am homeward bound.
I have shipped on a Yankee clipper ship, Davy Crockett is her name, And her captain's name it is Burgess, And they say she's a floating shame.
Oh the sun is on the harbour, love, And I wish I could remain, For I know it will be some long time Before I see you again.
How to Sing It
This is a slow one, and you must let it BE slow. Resist the urge to push it along. The grief of the song lives in the unhurried bits, the same as it does in The Parting Glass — and like that one, it's a goodbye, and you don't rush a goodbye.
Verse from one strong voice, chorus from the whole room. That's the shape of it. Let one singer carry the story — the leaving, the Cape Horn, the floating shame of a ship — and then everyone comes in together on "so fare thee well, my own true love." That gathering-in on the chorus is the heart of it. It sounds like the crew, or the dockside, all the voices a leaving man is leaving behind.
Pitch it where a roomful of ordinary throats can reach the chorus, because they WILL want to sing it, and you don't want them straining. Unaccompanied is gorgeous. A soft guitar or a fiddle drawing out underneath is grand too. No bodhrán battering away — wrong song for it.
For a session, I love it as the turn from the rowdy into the tender. Roar through the daft cumulative joy of the Rattlin' Bog till the place is in bits laughing, then let the room settle and bring this one in low. The contrast lands hard.
And when you sing it — knowing now how close we came to never having it at all — give the chorus a bit extra. You're not just singing a song. You're keeping the candle lit.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat sat on the windowsill the whole time I was writing this, staring out at the rain like a sailor watching a harbour. He's an awful old soul for a cat. Older than he's any right to be, if I'm honest, but that's a story for another day.