Annotation:Tobacco's but an Indian Weed

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X:1 T:A Song T:Tobacco’s but an Indian Weed M:C| L:1/8 R:Air B:Thomas D’Urfey – Wit and Mirth; or, Pills to Purge Melancholy, B:vol. 3 (1719, p. 291) Z:AK/Fiddler’s Companion K:Gmin A|B3A G2ff|(gf) (ed) f3f|b3a g2f2|(fed>) e d3d| d2 ef (gf) (ed)| (ed) cB c2 BA|G2g2 g3^f|g2 g4z||

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TOBACCO'S BUT AN INDIAN WEED. AKA - "Tobacco." English, Air (4/4 time). G Minor (D'Urfey): C Minor (Chappell): A Minor (Scott). Standard tuning (fiddle). One part. The words to the song were printed in the first volume of Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: Pills to Purge Melancholy (1699), and, with music, in vol. 3 of the same work (1719). Musicologist William Chappell (1859) thought it to have been founded on "Meditations on Tobacco", a poem by George Wither (1588–1667), a Puritan-leaning English poet popular during the reign of James I. Wither's words appear in The Marrow of Complements of 1654. A parable of life, the 'Tobacco' song long retained its popularity, eventually being published with the addition of an inferior second part by the Reverend Ralph Erskine, a Scot, in his Gospel Sonnets as "Smoking Spiritualized." In this form it survived well into the 19th century. Authorship was claimed by John Blockley (who set a great many of Tennyson's lyrics), nevertheless, the antiquity of the song is proven, concludes Chappell.

Hogarth, William (style of); A Smoking Party; Walker Art Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/a-smoking-party-97192

Tobacco is an Indian weed,
Green, green in the morn, cut
Down at Eve,--
It shares our decay,
Man's life is but clay,
Think of this when you're
Smoking Tobacco!

Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with championing the habit of tobacco smoking in the Elizabethan court. Considered by the general population for some time afterward as disrespectable, even alien and sinister, by the late 16th and 17th centuries it had become ensconced in the fashionable classes, who immersed themselves deeply in the habit—the height of fashion for many Dutch, English and French people. In fact, association of tobacco with desirable male qualities, such as health, power, freedom, intelligence, etc. began not with advertising campaigns but with the almost immediate public perception that tobacco was the affectation of the mercenary soldier, a man with excess money, a wandering carefree lifestyle, who was at one and the same time rugged and dandyish. By the 18th century the upper classes of England indulged themselves regularly and the phenomenon of smoking clubs arose. These gentlemens’ clubs were a popular venue for good conversation and convivial relaxation, with a glass of porter or punch and a fine, long-burning pipeful of tobacco. As with much fashion of the day, it came in for satire and caricature at the hands of Hogarth and others.

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