In one of the rare touching moments in Quentin Tarantino’s film The Hateful Eight (2015), the captured fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) picks up a guitar and sings a song about a prisoner on a ship. Although Domergue eventually adds a few lines of her own about getting revenge upon her captor John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) and escaping to Mexico, the song itself is a traditional Australian folk song called “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” or sometimes simply “Jim Jones.”
“Jim Jones at Botany Bay”
The song refers to the first Australian penal colony, Botany Bay, where England sent convicts beginning in 1788. Star Trek fans may recognize the name because the ship that carried Khan Noonien Singh and his comrades was named the S.S. Botany Bay after the penal colony.
In “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” the singer Jim Jones is an English convict who has been sentenced to ride the ship to the penal colony, although the judge first threatened to hang him. On the trip, the men on the ship repel a group of pirates, but Jones thinks, “I’d rather joined that pirate ship than come to New South Wales.”
Jones dreams of escaping and joining “the bold bushrangers there Jack Donahue and Company.”
And some dark night when everything is silent in this town,
I’ll kill the tyrants one by one and shoot the floggers down;
I’ll give the law a little shock, remember what I say;
They’ll yet regret they sent Jim Jones in chains to Botany Bay.
The song was first published in 1907, although The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature notes that scholars speculate that the song was written around 1830 because of the reference to the bushranger Jack Donahue (sometimes spelled “John Donohoe”). Donahue was an Irishman sentenced to Australia in 1825. But he later escaped, forming gangs that stole from wealthy land owners. He eventually was killed in a shootout in New South Wales.
So, the song would have been around during the years after the Civil War, which is the setting for The Hateful Eight. And it might not be unusual for someone like Daisy Domergue to be fond of a ballad about another outlaw.
Versions of the Song
“Jim Jones at Botany Bay” has been performed and recorded by a number of singers. Bob Dylan recorded “Jim Jones” for his Good As I Been To You (1992) album. You may hear a clip of Bob Dylan’s version on his website.
The video below features Old Crow Medicine Show performing the song at Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2010. Check it out.
For a complete recording of “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” below is a version by Australian singer-songwriter Gary Shearston.
In modern decades, the song has been used as a song of defiance as it was in The Hateful Eight. For example, English folksinger A.L. “Bert” Lloyd sang ““Jim Jones at Botany Bay”
And that is the Story Behind the Song.
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