Subject: Lyr Add: SAM HALL (ca. 1840s)
From:
Jim Dixon
Date: 07 Jan 13 - 10:17 PM
From Memories of London in the 'Forties by David Masson (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1908), page 153:
...I will dare to put in print my recollection of the great Ross of the Cider Cellars, in his character of "Sam Hall".
The evening is pretty far advanced; and the supping groups at the crowded tables, grey heads and literary celebrities among them, have composed themselves, in a lull following previous songs, for the appearance of the great Ross. He makes his appearance at last, in a kind of raised box or pulpit in one corner of the room;?a strange, gruesome figure, in ragged clothes, with a battered old hat on his head, his face stained and grimed to represent a chimney-sweep's, and a piece of short black pipe in his mouth. Removing his pipe, and looking round with a dull, brutal scowl or glare, he begins, as if half in soliloquy, half in address to an imaginary audience, his slow chaunt of the condemned felon, whose last night in prison has come, and who is to be hanged next morning:?
"My name it is Sam Hall,
Chimney-sweep,
Chimney-sweep:
My name it is Sam Hall,
Chimney-sweep.
My name it is Sam Hall;
I've robbed both great and small;
And now I pays for all:
Damn your eyes!"
Some three or four stanzas follow, in which the poor semi-bestial, illiterate, and religionless wretch, in the same slow chaunt, as if to a psalm-tune, anticipates the incidents of the coming morning;? the arrival of the sheriffs, the arrival of the hangman, the drive to Tyburn; each stanza, however heart-broken, ending with the one ghastly apostrophe which is the sole figure of speech that life-long custom has provided for his soul's relief. Thus:?
"And the parson he will come,
He will come,
He will come:
And the parson he will come,
He will come.
And the parson he will come,
And he'll look so blasted glum;
And he'll talk of Kingdom Come:
Damn his eyes!"
The last stanza of all will be addition enough:?
"And now I goes upstairs,
To the drop,
To the drop:
And now I goes upstairs,
To the drop;
And now I goes upstairs,
There's a hend to all my cares:
So you'll tip me all your prayers:
Damn your eyes!"
A black bit of London recollection this, certainly; but, strong as it is, it has seemed worth preserving. Whether the song of Sam Hall is in print anywhere, or who wrote it, I know not; but I daresay I could recover the whole from my memory, such was the impression it made that evening I heard the great Ross sing it.1 He was, I afterwards learnt, an Aberdeen man, who had begun his career of tavern-singer in more lowly haunts, and had at length, by strange chance, flashed out in this one part for a season before the gathered night-herds of London. What became of him, poor fellow, I never heard.
1 Since these Memories have appeared in 'Blackwood's Magazine', the following information has been kindly sent me by Mr Stephen Ponder: "Sam Hall is not yet extinct. It is still popular in Australia and the United States of America, and I have heard it sung by a Dutchman in Sumatra a very few years ago. But Ross, or whoever was the author, simply adapted the very much older ballad of 'Captain Kidd':?
'My name was Captain Kidd
When I sailed, when I sailed,
My name was Captain Kidd
When I sailed.
My name was Captain Kidd,
And God's laws I did forbid,
And most wickedly I did,
When I sailed.'
... I remember a 'variant' of' Sam Hall' being made to suit the Kelly gang in Victoria thirty years ago."?F. M.
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