Merchants, The

DESCRIPTION: "It's all about the cruel rogues of merchants No pity or love do they show." They live a life of ease and luxury and sell poor goods and show no charity. But death found rich and poor on Florizel and Titanic and will find the merchants too.
AUTHOR: Paddy Dover
EARLIEST DATE: 1966 (Doyle-OldTimeSongsAndPoetryOfNewfoundland, 4th edition)
KEYWORDS: hardheartedness poverty commerce nonballad
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Lehr/Best-ComeAndIWillSingYou 78, "The Merchants" (1 text, 1 tune)
Doyle-OldTimeSongsAndPoetryOfNewfoundland, "The Merchants" (1 text, 1 tune): pp. 51-52 in the 4th edition
Roud #26131
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Merchant's Song" (subject: Newfoundland's truck system) and references there
NOTES [315 words]: Florizel and Titanic, of course, are famous Newfoundland wrecks with songs of their own. - BS
It's a sad irony to note that, on the Titanic at least, losses were heavier among the third class passengers (who were down below) than the rich in first class.
The bitterness in this song is not at all surprising. Newfoundland was a very poor place, with much of the population isolated and ill-educated and unable to really express its desires politically -- in an island where the population was scattered in "outports" with no connection but by sea, and where every town was too small to have local politics or taxes (in 1901, there were only 18 towns with a population of even 1000 people; Noel, p. 18 n. 1), it was almost impossible to form a political movement anywhere in St. John's.
The effect of this was to put control of almost everything in the (relatively) well-off hands of the St. John's merchants. J. D. Rogers concluded that "the merchant 'acted as banker, mint, and clearing-house, besides acting as money-lender, export-agent, and import-agent" (Noel, p. 8). In other words, the people had to sell their fish and crops to the merchants at the merchants' price, and they had to buy everything else at the merchants' price.
The result that the merchants of St. John's (often referred to as "Water Street," after the road on which many of them were located) had disproportionate influence -- and were perceived as having even more than they did. In the early years of the twentieth century, political, economic, and even physical conflicts between "Water Street" and the ordinary people were common; see e.g. Cadigan, pp. 1, 170-171 (there are several other passages in the book affirming this same point).
For background on the Florizel, see "The Wreck of the Steamship Florizel." For the Titanic, see "The Titanic (XV) ("On the tenth day of April 1912") (Titanic #15)." - RBW
Bibliography

Cadigan: Sean T. Cadigan, Newfoundland and Labrador: A History, University of Toronto Press, 2009
Noel: S. J. R. Noel, Politics in Newfoundland, University of Toronto Press, 1971

Last updated in version 6.1
File: LeBe078

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography