Maggie May (folk song)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  "Maggie May" is a traditional Liverpool folk song about a prostitute who robbed a sailor coming home from a round trip at sea. The song names real streets, names a real crime, and ends with a real punishment: transportation to Botany Bay. Yet it has also been described as "last fling of sailor balladry" by folk singer A. L. Lloyd, and it found its way into the teenage repertoire of John Lennon years before the Beatles existed. How does a song about theft and deportation become a staple of skiffle sessions, a West End musical, and a hidden gem on a Beatles album? The answers lie in what the song actually says, how it survived, and why it refused to stay forgotten.

• 2. The Story in the Lyrics

  ›

  In the most established version, the narrator is a sailor who has just sailed home to Liverpool from Sierra Leone. Paid off for the trip, he spots Maggie cruising near old Canning Place. She takes him back to her lodgings. When he wakes the next morning, his money and even his clothes are gone. She tells him the clothes are at "Kelly's locker", a pawn shop. When he finds nothing there, he calls the police. Maggie is found guilty of theft and sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay.

  The song plants itself in very specific geography. Lime Street, at the centre of Liverpool, is named as Maggie's favoured haunt in the most familiar version of the chorus. Stan Hugill, a British sea music historian, notes that other versions substitute Paradise Street, Peter Street, and Park Lane, each of which was associated with a different historical red light area of the city. The Beatles' version refers to currency in the old pounds, shillings, and pence system; "two pounds ten" means two pounds sterling and ten shillings, the narrator's weekly wage from the voyage.

• 3. Roots and Origins

  ›

  Hugill traces one of the earliest known references to the song in the diary of Charles Picknell, a sailor aboard the female-convict ship Kains, which sailed to Van Diemen's Land in 1830. That date places the song squarely in the actual era of penal transportation described in its own lyrics. In that early version, the protagonist is not Maggie at all but "charming Nellie Ray", whose chorus sends her to "Van Dieman's cruel shore" for having "skinned so many tailors, and robbed so many sailors". Whether Nellie Ray was a real transported prostitute and thief is uncertain, though Hugill suggests she may have been.

  The relationship between this song and the 1856 American slave song "Darling Nellie Gray", published under the name of Benjamin Hanby, remains unclear. The tunes are very similar, and Hanby's chorus contains the line "oh, my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away, I'll never see my darling anymore". The same tune also appears in the Geordie song "Keep yor feet still Geordie hinny", with words credited to Joe Wilson. Whether the Liverpool song borrowed Hanby's tune, or Hanby's song adopted existing words, or the similarity is coincidental has not been settled. John Manifold, writing in his Penguin Australian Song Book, described the song as "a foc'sle song of Liverpool origin apparently, but immensely popular among seamen all over the world".

• 4. The Skiffle Era and the Ban

  ›

  A. L. Lloyd recorded "Maggie May" in 1956 on the album English Drinking Songs. His liner notes called it a song that had "found its way into every ship but none of the songbooks". The following year, Liz Winters and Bob Cort released a skiffle version. The Vipers Skiffle Group also put out a version in 1957, and it became the best-known recording of that period. BBC Radio banned it on release because of the sexual content of its lyrics. Stan Kelly sang a version on his 1958 EP Liverpool Packet.

  The skiffle craze was precisely the cultural moment that fixed Lime Street as Maggie's defining address. Multiple recordings were circulating, and younger musicians in Liverpool were picking up the song through that wave of interest. One of those musicians was a teenage John Lennon, whose skiffle group the Quarrymen had formed in 1957 and would eventually evolve into the Beatles by 1960. The song became a staple of the Quarrymen's repertoire, and Lennon would continue making home recordings of it right up to his death in 1980.

• 5. Lionel Bart's West End Version

  ›

  In 1964, the composer and lyricist Lionel Bart took the song and its backstory as the basis for a full musical set around the Liverpool Docks. The show, also called Maggie May, ran for two years in London. Bart kept the traditional tune but rewrote the lyrics substantially. His version is sung in the third person, and Maggie is transformed from a convicted thief into a heroine whose departure from the streets is mourned by those who knew her. A "rotten Homeward Bounder" is now the villain of the piece.

  Kenneth Haigh performed the Bart version in the original cast recording of the musical. Judy Garland took the song up as a regular piece in her own performances and recorded it on the Maggie May EP in 1964. The Beatles are known to have seen and discussed the Bart musical before their own recording of the traditional version, which gives their studio warm-up a slightly different weight: they were returning to a song whose theatrical reinvention they had already encountered.

• 6. The Beatles' 39 Seconds

  ›

  During the Get Back sessions in early 1969, the Beatles spent time in the studio warming up by playing old rock and roll and skiffle songs from their teenage years. Their run-through of "Maggie May" was done in a joking manner, with heavy Scouse accents. At 39 seconds, it is the second-shortest song released on an official Beatles album; the shortest is "Her Majesty", which runs 23 seconds.

  The truncated version was included on the 1970 album Let It Be as the last track on the first side, immediately following the title song. All four Beatles were credited as arrangers of the traditional song on the track listing, which allowed them to collect the writers' share of publishing income from a public domain work. The track listing spelled it "Maggie Mae" rather than "Maggie May". It was also the first cover song on a Beatles album since "Act Naturally" was recorded in June 1965 for Help!

  The personnel on the recording were John Lennon on vocals and acoustic guitar (a Gibson J-200), Paul McCartney on vocals and acoustic guitar (a Martin D-28), George Harrison playing a bass-line on electric guitar (a Fender Telecaster), and Ringo Starr on drums. When Let It Be...Naked was released, both "Maggie Mae" and "Dig It" were omitted from the main album but "Maggie Mae" appeared on the bonus disc, "Fly on the Wall", at seventeen minutes and thirty seconds. That extended version runs past the 39-second mark and segues at 54 seconds into "I Fancy Me Chances" as McCartney sings "Take it Maggie...oh, I fancy me chances with you".

• 7. Later Life of the Song

  ›

  The song appears twice in the 2010 biopic Nowhere Boy. First, Julia Lennon plays it for a teenage John and he learns it himself, both of them on the four-string banjo. Later in the film, it is shown as the first song played by Lennon's band the Quarrymen, though the film acknowledges this was not their actual first public appearance. A performance by the cast, billed as "The Nowhere Boys", appears on the film's soundtrack album, with the song credited to British musician and songwriter Wally Whyton.

  In 2017, the song appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, sung by a character named Uncle Jack and performed by Paul McCartney. Elsewhere, Hughie Jones of The Spinners recorded his own version and later claimed that the real Maggie May had lived on Duke Street and died in 1952. Rod Stewart has said that this folk song was the inspiration for his own 1971 hit single "Maggie May", which reached number one in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.