The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #93571   Message #1803412
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
07-Aug-06 - 09:30 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Dockyard Gate (from Peter Bellamy)
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Peter Bellamy's Dockyard Gate
This isn't a song that has turned up much in oral currency; the most complete text came from Frederick Fennemore at Portsmouth Workhouse in 1907 (Gardiner MSS H868). It has been published in Frank Purslow's Marrow Bones (1965), and in Roy Palmer's Oxford Book of Sea Songs (1986), re-isssued as Boxing the Compass (2001). In fact, Palmer reprints the Marrow Bones text, which had been edited a bit by Purslow, with an extra verse added and some alterations made based on broadside editions of the song. The line "Perhaps he's at his watch on deck, our joys he can't behold" quoted in Marrow Bones was actually sung by Fennemore as "Or perhaps he is in the black list, our joys will never unfold".

Sam Larner sounds to me to be singing "our joys we can behold", but it's "Our joys he can't behold" in the broadsides, two editions of which, both from Such of London, can be seen at  Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads:

Plymouth Sound.