Tobacco's But an Indian Weed

DESCRIPTION: Tobacco is offered as a parable for life: "Grows green at morn, cut down at eve." "The pipe... Is broke with a touch -- man's life is such." "The smoke... shows us man's life must have an end." The moral: "Think on this when you smoke tobacco."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1699 (Pills to Purge Melancholy); also in Trinity College (Dublin) MS. G.2.21
KEYWORDS: nonballad drugs
FOUND IN: Britain(England(West)) US(Ap)
REFERENCES (13 citations):
Beck-SongsOfTheMichiganLumberjacks 93, "A Peculiar Sermon for Shanty Boys" (1 text)
Boette-SingaHipsyDoodle, p. 45, "Tobacco Is an Indian Weed" (1 fragment, 1 tune)
Bush-FSofCentralWestVirginiaVol2, p. 58, "Tobacco Is an Indian Weed" (1 fragment, 1 tune)
Logan-APedlarsPack, pp. 262-263, "Tobacco" (1 text)
Chappell-PopularMusicOfTheOldenTime, pp. 563-564, "Tobacco Is an Indian Weed" (1 text, 1 tune)
Chappell/Wooldridge-OldEnglishPopularMusic II, pp. 78-79, "Tobacco's But an Indian Weed" (1 text, 1 tune)
Dixon-AncientPoemsBalladsSongsOfThePeasantryOfEngland, Song #37, pp. 233-235, "Tobacco" (1 text); Poem #8, pp. 36-39, "Smoking Spiritualised" (1 text)
Bell-Combined-EarlyBallads-CustomsBalladsSongsPeasantryEngland, pp. 259-261, "Smoking Spiritualized"; pp. 452-453, "Tobacco" (2 texts)
Scott-EnglishSongBook, pp. 80-81, "Tobacco" (1 text, 1 tune)
Baring-Gould/Sheppard-SongsOfTheWest2ndEd, #95, "Tobacco Is an Indian Weed" (1 text, 1 tune)
Olson-BroadsideBalladIndex, ZN2658, "Tobacco is but an Indian weed"
ADDITIONAL: Norman Ault, _Elizabethan Lyrics From the Original Texts_, pp. 56-57, "A Religious Use of Taking Tobacco" (1 text)
DT, INDNWEED*
ST Log262 (Full)
Roud #1457
NOTES [330 words]: This also appears as a portion of a poem, "Smoking Spiritualized." The remaining portion is said to be "very inferior." "Smoking Spiritualized" was published under the name of Rev. Ralph (or "Ebenezer") Erskine in a book of Gospel Sonnets. Although some have thought that the Erskine version is older than that in Pills, the fact that Erskine was born in 1685 argues that the song is older than his work. Dixon-AncientPoemsBalladsSongsOfThePeasantryOfEngland and Bell-Combined-EarlyBallads-CustomsBalladsSongsPeasantryEngland offers some details on this history; it is possible that Erskine added a second part to the poem, or simply reworked it to produce the "Smoking Spiritualized" form.
Baring-Gould/Sheppard-SongsOfTheWest2ndEd suggest that it was by George Withers, since it is found "in [a] MS. of the date of James I, with his initials to it."
Ault offers an even earlier claim, crediting the piece to "Wisdome" and dating the poem "before 1568." I'm not sure if that is based on the Trinity College manuscript or the dates for Wisdome or just pure fancy; my suspicion is the last. I have some reasons for my suspicion: according to Linda and Roger Flavell, Dictionary of English down the Ages: Words & Phrases Born out of Historical Events Great and Small (originally published as The Chronology of Words and Phrases, 1999), Kyle Cathie Ltd, 2006, pp. 138-139, although Columbus himself was the first to see tobacco smoked, and Europeans were cultivating it by the mid-sixteenth century, the original English terms for it were "tabaco" or "tabacco." The form "tobacco" did not become widespread until the early seventeenth century -- when, e.g., King James VI and I wrote his Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604). James didn't like tobacco, but had too much of an economic interest in it to be able to ban it! So anything written in 1568 would, at minimum, have used a different form. - RBW
Beck credits this to "some moralizing shanty boy of 1892." Surprise! - PJS
Last updated in version 6.7
File: Log262

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