Seth Davy, sometimes spelled Seth Davey, was a black street entertainer who worked in Liverpool, England, at the turn of the 20th century, and was immortalised in the folk song "Whiskey on a Sunday".
This vagueness had led to the assumption that the character was imaginary, although many Liverpudlians claimed to have seen him in person.
Fritz Spiegl possessed a lantern slide clearly showing a poor black street entertainer with three jig dolls at Bevington Bush, surrounded by children.
Popular belief is that Seth Davy was West Indian, possibly Jamaican, though Ray Costello in his Black History, a history of Liverpool's black population, says that he was West African.
Davy sang 'Massa is a stingy man', from the repertoire of Dan Emmett, one of the stars of American minstrelsy, which contains the lines:"Sing come day, go dayGod send SundayWe'll drink whiskey all de weekAnd buttermilk on Sunday'"