Wives & sweethearts or, Saturday night

This song was written by Charles Dibdin for The Whim of the Moment (1788) (Sime 2:212-14). It is a typical Dibdin “sailor’s song.” The tune and the lyrics appeared in the Edinburgh Musical Miscellany and in fifteen songsters between 1798 and 1815 but the song did not last except as a Dibdin curiosity (Roud; R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

This is one of at least four songs in circulation sometimes titled “Saturday Night.” Two were by Dibdin, this song, and “Saturday Night at Sea,” beginning “’Twas Saturday Night, the twinkling stars,” written for The Oddities (1789).

This broadside is one of seven English prints Thomas added to his collection of Coverly broadsides before having them bound (see The Sailor’s Departure from His True Love Susan). Three of the English prints, including this one, are identified as coming from John Evans’s press at Long Lane, West Smithfield, between 1791 and 1792, and the others resemble them closely. They are printed from engraved plates and the fine details of the illustrations are enhanced with watercolors. Broadsides like these were rare in America although not unknown.