Duck Foot Sue

Lyrics from 1884 Sheet Music

Oh! listen for a while,
And I will tell to you,
It's about a girl I had,
Her name was Duck Foot Sue;
She was gentle and divine 
Long waisted in her feet,
And her heel stuck out behind
Like an 18 carat beet

So now I'll sing to you
Of the girl I loved so true
She was chief engineer 
In the white shirt laundry
Out in the back yard view
Her beauty was all she had 
With a mouth like a soft shell crab
She'd an India rubber lip 
Like a rudder of a ship
And I tell you she was bad

She was not very fat 
Nor was she very thin
For she looked when she was dressed 
Like a straw in a barrel of gin
I took her to a hall, 
The "Fat Man's Social Club"
And it took me half a sov
To settle for her grub

Her face was the colour of a ham
She had ears like a Japanese fan
She could talk for an hour
With a forty horse power
She'd a voice like a catamaran
Her hair was an indigo blue
She was as graceful as a Kangaroo
You ought to see her tussle 
With a patent leather bussel
She could whistle like a steam boat too

When first she went away, 
It almost took my breath, 
There's one thing I am sure, 
She'll never starve to death
If I had married her 
I'd have always been afraid 
Of being shot or scalped
By the mother-in-law brigade

For she was a funny old guy
She had a double barrel squint in her eye
She'd a number ten feet 
They would cover up the street
She'd a mouth like a crack in a pie
She had a cheerful cemetery laugh
She had a head like an excellent calf
She's a iron-clad clipper 
Built gun boat brig
With a ball on her main top gaff

This rather surreal song was written in the 1870s or early 1880s and has survived in various forms in the traditional music of the English-speaking world . There are versions sung in the UK, Canada , the USA and Australia . The title is usually Duck Foot Sue , but does vary sometimes – its also known as Slue Foot Sue . At the risk of ruining the mystery, the term “duck-foot” comes from “Dutch foot” a bowlegged style of furniture leg .

The song was written by Harry Bennett, but some sources also credit GW Hunter, the performer most associated with it in the Halls. It was apparently first published as sheet music in 1884, but it was being performed before this, at least as early as 1883. It was a popular piece amongst amateur singers, and there are multiple records of it being sung in the UK in smoking concerts, penny readings and the like, between 1883 and the end of the century. It was also popular in America in the 1880s, and it appeared in print in an Americanised form in Wehman’s Collection of Songs No.12 (1886) available at the excellent website traditionalmusic.co.uk.

The song started being recorded in the repertoire of traditional singers in the late 1930s. The subsequent story of the song in UK traditional music is told on the excellent Mainly Norfolk site. In the States it was recorded in the late 1920s by The Bob Miller Trio and in the 1930s by The Buckeye Boys. I don’t have information about whether it was being recorded or performed in Australia at that time….

Returning to its Music Hall origins, Kilgarriff lists the song as appearing both in the repertoire of GW Hunter and George Foster (1864 – 1946). Foster was an actor and performer in the 1880s, but by 1890 he was established as an artiste’s agent and seems to have stopped performing.