Everything’s Rosie explores a derivative the Sally Brown songs: The Wildest Girl in Town. The song was written for and sung by a once-upon-a-time glamorous and always wild rose who shared a turbulent life long marriage with a high ranking Skull and Bones CIA agent. They were stationed in Chile during the early 70s. I’ve chosen to insert both video and print interventions into an open air thrift market on Warren Street to sift through and recontextualize almost 30 years of Rose’s ascerbic journal entries, and correspondence alongside the elderly and confident Rose singing The Wildest Girl in Town.
In 1830, Moses Ashley Curtis heard slave boatmen on the Cape Fear River singing a song, and recorded its refrain in his diary.
It was the refrain of a popular sea chantey Sally Brown that spoke longingly of a beautiful Jamaican woman. Lonely mariners sang Sally Brown throughout the Atlantic and half a world away in the Pacific at the same time these boatmen crooned it on the Cape Fear. (Stan Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, 1916) Sally Brown’s character was sometimes aloof and inaccessible, but many, many versions of the song feature a very lascivious Sally.
Laurel Aitken sings a version of Sally Brown: The Wildest Girl In Town
and a cover by Bad Manners:
