Мэгги Мэй: История ливерпульской баллады

Traditional folk song from Liverpool, England
the traditional folk song
[[File:Liverpool Sailors Home. jpg|thumb|The Liverpool Sailors' Home in Canning Place, c. 1860. The sailor is "paid off at the Home" and meets Maggie "cruising up and down" the square. In one version of the lyrics she is wearing a "crin o line", the bell shaped dress worn by the woman in the foreground. It became widely circulated in a skiffle version from the late 1950s. In 1964, the composer and lyricist Lionel Bart (the creator of the musical Oliver! ), used the song and its backstory as the basis of a musical set around the Liverpool Docks. The show, also called Maggie May, ran for two years in London. In 1970, a truncated version of the song performed by the Beatles was included on their album Let It Be.

British sea music historian Stan Hugill writes of an early reference to the song in the diary of Charles Picknell, a sailor on the female convict ship Kains that sailed to Van Diemen's Land in 1830. This indicates that versions of the song date back to the actual period of penal transportation mentioned in the lyrics as Maggie's fate. In the earliest known version, the protagonist is "charming Nellie Ray", who may have been a real transported prostitute and thief. The historical relation of the song to the 1856 American slave song "Darling Nellie Gray" published as the work of Benjamin Hanby is unclear. The tune is very similar and the chorus of Hanby's song contains the lines "Oh, my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away, I'll never see my darling anymore". It's possible that Hanby's tune was adopted to the existing words. The same tune is used for the Geordie song "Keep yor feet still Geordie hinny" to words by Joe Wilson.

"Maggie May" was widely performed in the late 1950s, and was adapted to the skiffle craze of the era. In this period Lime Street was established as her favoured haunt. The Vipers Skiffle Group also released a version in that year. This became the best known recording at the time, but it was banned by BBC Radio on its release because of the sexual content of the lyrics. Stan Kelly also sang a version on his 1958 EP Liverpool Packet. The Lionel Bart version in the 1964 musical uses the traditional tune, but changes the lyrics somewhat. It is sung in the third person and Maggie is transformed into a heroine whose departure from the streets is lamented ("some rotten Homeward Bounder has got his grip around her"). This version was performed by Kenneth Haigh in the original cast recording of the musical. The Bart version was regularly sung by Judy Garland, and was recorded by her on the Maggie May EP in 1964. The Beatles are known to have seen and discussed the Bart musical. The song was also recorded by The Searchers and by Hughie Jones of The Spinners (Jones later claimed that the real Maggie May lived in Duke Street and died in 1952). It was also recorded in several albums of sea shanties, by Cyril Tawney, Bob Roberts and others. The song appears twice in the 2010 biopic Nowhere Boy. First, it is played for a teenage John Lennon by his mother, Julia, and he then learns to play it himself, both on the four string banjo. Later in the film the song is shown as the first one played by Lennon's band The Quarrymen, though this was not in fact their first public appearance. A performance by the cast (as "The Nowhere Boys") appears on the film's soundtrack album. The song is sung in the 2017 film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, by a character named Uncle Jack, portrayed by Paul McCartney.

Rod Stewart has said that this folk song inspired his 1971 hit single Maggie May, which was number one in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.