That Dirty, No-Good, Robbin' Maggie Mae

The Liverpool lovely who robbed the sailors and the captains of the whalers

A horny sailor and his money are soon parted

One night last month on my radio show (Terrell’s Sound World, KSFR, Santa Fe), I played a track from one of my favorite records in recent months. I’m talking about Departure, the latest album by a Canadian band called The Pressgang Mutiny. These guys specialize in sea chanties and other old sailor tunes. The song I chose was one I’d heard before, a salty little tale called “Maggie May.” Sounds like this:

I’m sure most of you have heard the same previous version I have, the one by John, Paul, George and Ringo:

When back announcing the songs I’d just played on my show that night, I mentioned that the lads from Liverpool had done a version of “Maggie” before. And then, just to be provocative, I declared it was “the best song on Let it Be.

I’m such a devil!

Do I really believe that? Oh, probably not. But Let It Be truly is a mediocre album by Beatles standards and I do like the track a lot more than some of the schlocky tunes that Phil Spector ruined. The Beatles’ version of “Maggie” lasts only 40 seconds. I wish “The Long and Winding Road” had been only 40 seconds (or less).

Of course, “Maggie Mae” wasn’t written by Lennon & McCartney nor any other Beatle. But, according to Beatle historian and Beatlemaniac Dave Rybaczewski the idea to do the song came from John Lennon while the group was coming up with songs for what would be the Let it Be album:

John thought to resurrect some old abandoned ideas as well as to dredge up one particular ditty from his childhood that he seriously wanted to include in the project. This song, with origins that date back to the early 1800’s, was titled “Maggie Mae.” A Beatles performance of the song may not have materialized in the way he originally intended, but it did at least gain inclusion on the release in a truncated form at his insistence.

So what’s the origin of “Maggie May”?

British seafaring-song historian Stan Hugill, in his 1961 book Shanties from the Seven Seas: Shipboard Work-Songs and Some Songs Used as Work-Songs from the Great Days of Sail, dedicates a chapter to this tune about what he called a “very famous Liverpool judy,” noting:

… as to who she was or where she lived and when nobody seems able to state. But whether an historical character or fictitious, it matters not, seeing that she represents a type of sailor’s inamorata ever with us yet. Apparently she acted once too often and was caught and transported to the Colonies.

Does this not look like a guy who’d be an expert on sea shanties?

Hugill writes that he found a reference to the song in the diary of Charles Picknell (1810-1886), a lifelong sailor who in 1830 was part of the crew for the Kains, a transport ship for women convicts who were sent to the notorious Van Diemen’s Land — an island off the Australian mainland known for some truly awful prison colonies. It basically was the 19th Century version of CECOT. Van Diemen’s now is called Tasmania.

Picknell called the song “Nellie Ray.”

Folk music being folk music, many details of the song changed through the years. For instance, besides changing the name of the main character, Peter Street became “Lime Street” or “Paradise Street” or other Liverpool red-light districts. In some versions poor Mags was sent to “Botany Bay” (also in Australia) instead of Van Diemen’s land. The amount of the homeward-bounder’s pay varies. And in British folksinger A.L. Lloyd’s 1956 version, the deceitful street walker didn’t rob the whalers. She “poxed” them, i.e. gave them some sort of disease, presumedly of the venereal type.

The song also became popular among the British skiffle bands of the 1950s. One of the best known was by a group called The Vipers. The Beatles probably were familiar with their version as it was produced by a guy named George Martin and recorded at Abbey Road studios:

And actually, The Beatles were not the only “British-Invasion” era Mercy Beat band to perform “Maggie Mae.” The Searchers sang of those salacious Lime Street crimes as early as 1963. And truthfully, though the sound quality of this video isn’t great, this is one of my favorite arrangements of the song.

Also happening in England about this time — 1964 to be exact — composer Lionel Bart and playwright Alun Davies Owen created a musical called Maggie May based on the old song. And, yes, the title character is a Liverpool tart named Margaret Mary Duffy who’s in love with some sailor boy. In September of that year, Bart’s friend Judy Garland released an EP titled Judy Garland Sings Lionel Bart’s Maggie May. The track “Maggie Maggie May,” which has a similar melody and chorus as the one I’ve been yammering about here. Here’s the famous Judy singing about that “famous Liverpool judy”

I guess Maggie stole this guy’s shirt

Skipping back 100-plus years to good old Charlie Picknell’s seafaring journal of 1830, you might recall that “Maggie Mae” was called “Nellie Ray” in that old version. Then, inn 1856, an American songwriter named Benjamin Handby wrote a song. It wasn’t about a drunken sailor ripped off by a thieving sex worker. It concerned a heartbroken Kentucky slave lamenting the fact that his sweetheart, Nelly Gray, had been sold to some plantation in Georgia.

Handy was born into an abolitionist family:, his father William once had been an indentured servant. The family had been involved in the Underground Railroad

According to the website Ohio Memory (“A Collaborative Program of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio”):

In 1856, Benjamin’s music teacher encouraged him to submit a song that he had written and composed, titled “Darling Nelly Gray,” to a publisher. The song was based on Joseph Selby, an escaping enslaved man who found shelter at the Hanby’s Rushville home in 1842. Selby was trying to reach Canada and earn enough money to purchase freedom for his fiancée, but he died at the Hanby’s home and was buried in the Rushville cemetery. “Darling Nelly Gray” was a huge success; it captured listeners’ hearts in the same way Uncle Tom’s Cabin had captured the hearts of readers.

Oh my darling Nelly Gray … or Maggie May … or Doris Day …

The chorus of “Nelly Gray” begins, “Oh! my poor Nelly Gray, they have taken you away/ And I'll never see my darling any more …” which is pretty similar to lines in “Nellie Ray” and, later, “Maggie May” (“Oh! my charming Nellie Ray, They have taken you away/ You have gone to Van Dieman’s cruel shore…”)

Being that, at least according to my math, 1830 was 26 years before 1856, it seems logical that Ben Hanby “borrowed” the lyrics for “Nelly Gray” from “Nellie Ray.” Not to mention that the melody is very similar to many versions of “Maggie.”

However, despite what Wikipedia implies, those lyrics (“Oh! my charming Nellie Ray…”) were not actually in Picknell’s diary. They were apparently added later. Lifted from “Nelly Gray”? Perhaps, but nobody seems able to say for sure.

Stan Hugill’s book cites a 1956 article from Sea Breezes, an old magazine for the shipping industry, in which an old British sailor R.F.P. Halliday wrote, “I was shipmates with an old Yankee sailor in the barque Ville de Dieppe a few years ago before the First World War …” and then gives the lyrics to the version, all four verse he heard. Halliday, according to Hugill, said, “the tune used was that of `My Darling Nellie Gray …,’ to which Hugill comments, “it seems that this tune does suit his set of words better than the usual one.”

Whatever the case, Louis Armstrong and The Mills Brothers did a cool version of Hanby’s song back in 1937:

So that’s the story of this infamous “judy.” (Apologies to anyone I know named “Judy”!) So let’s wrap it up with Paul McCartney doing a full-length live version of the greatest song from Let It Be.

For more deep dives into songs, check out The Stephen W. Terrell Web Log Songbook