Get Up, Jack! John, Sit Down!
(Jolly Roving Tar)
ChorusSinging, hey! laddie, ho! laddie, Swing the capstan 'round, 'round, 'round, When the money is gone it's the same old song, Get up, Jack! John, sit down!I go and take a trip in a man-o'-war To China or Japan, In Asia, there are ladies fair Who love the sailorman. When Jack and Joe palavers, And buy the girls a gown, gown, gown. When the money is gone it's the same old song, Get up, Jack! John, sit down!
(Chorus)When Jack is ashore he beats his way Towards some boarding-house: He's welcome in with his rum and gin, And he's fed with pork and scouse. For he'll spend and spend and never offend, But he'll lay drunk on the ground, ground, ground. When my money is gone it's the same old song: Get up, Jack! John, sit down!
(Chorus)When Jack is old and weatherbeat, Too old to roustabout, In some rum-shop they'll let him stop, At eight bells he's turned out. Then he cries, he cries up to the skies: I'll soon be homeward bound, bound, bound. When my money is gone it's the same old song: Get up, Jack! John, sit down!
(Chorus)
Source: Collected by John Lomax in American Ballads and Folk Songs from John Thomas, a Welsh sailor aboard the Philadelphia, 1896
Written for the 1885 expansion of Old Lavender, a popular New York stage comedy by lyricist Edward Harrigan and composer David Braham. The song entered oral tradition quickly and was widely sung as a forebitter. The title phrase was a common cry from a boarding-house landlord or landlady when a sailor had spent his last penny ashore: his seat given to another paying customer, he was sent back to sea.
The phrase was already a sailor’s refrain before Harrigan put it on stage. A story called “Running the Blockade, by a British Engineer,” reprinted in American newspapers in April 1869 (for example the Republican Journal of Belfast, Maine), has its stranded narrator sit on a Bermuda wharf and sing “the old capstan song” until he is interrupted: “And when your money’s all gone and spent, / And no more can be borrowed or lent, / It’s walk out Jack, let John sit down, / For your money’s all gone and…”
This song and Homeward Bound share at least a verse in most print versions, showing the kind of cross-pollination common among forebitters of the era.