"Little Tommy Tucker" is an
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...
nursery rhyme
A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes.
From t ...
. It has a
Roud Folk Song Index
The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud (born 1949), a former librarian in the London ...
number of 19618.
Lyrics
Common modern versions include:
:Little Tommy Tucker
::Sings for his supper.
:What shall we give him?
::White bread and butter.
:How shall he cut it
::Without a knife?
:How will he be married
::Without a wife?
I. Opie and P. Opie
Iona Margaret Balfour Opie, (13 October 1923 – 23 October 2017) and Peter Mason Opie (25 November 1918 – 5 February 1982) were an English married team of folklorists who applied modern techniques to understanding children's literature and ...
, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 416–7.
Origins
According to Peter and
Iona Opie
Iona Margaret Balfour Opie, (13 October 1923 – 23 October 2017) and Peter Mason Opie (25 November 1918 – 5 February 1982) were an English married team of folklorists who applied modern techniques to understanding children's literature and ...
, the earliest version of this rhyme appeared in ''
Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book
''Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book'' is the first extant anthology of English nursery rhymes, published in London in 1744. It contains the oldest printed texts of many well-known and popular rhymes, as well as several that eventually dropped out of ...
'' (c. 1744), which recorded only the first four lines. The full version was included in ''Mother Goose's Melody'' (c. 1765).
[
To 'sing for one's supper' was a proverbial phrase by the seventeenth century. Early in that century, too, possible evidence of the rhyme's prior existence is suggested by the appearance of the line "Tom would eat meat but wants a knife" in ''An excellent new Medley'' (c. 1620), a composite work in which each line incorporates a reference to a contemporary song. Another possible reference occurs in Robert Herrick's epigram “Upon Tuck” that appears in ''Hesperides'' (1648):
::At post and pair, or slam, Tom Tuck would play
::This Christmas, but his want wherewith says nay.
The reference in the first line here is to stakes or forfeits in contemporary games of cards.
Once the rhyme entered the nursery repertoire it was frequently included in collections of such lore and tunes were then fitted to it. The ]Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
preserves an 1885 round for four voices by the Canadian Sydney Percival (musical pseudonym of Joseph Gould) in which Tommy is "singing for his supper. What shall he have but white bread and butter? How shall he cut it without any knife, How shall he marry without any wife?" In 1924 the English composer Peter Warlock
Philip Arnold Heseltine (30 October 189417 December 1930), known by the pseudonym Peter Warlock, was a British composer and music critic. The Warlock name, which reflects Heseltine's interest in occultism, occult practices, was used for all his ...
set it as the fifth piece in his ''Candlelight: a cycle of nursery jingles''. The rhyme was also included in Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s children's musical education project, ''Schulwek'' (1950).[A performance o]
YouTube
/ref>
Notes
External links
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English folk songs
Traditional children's songs
Songs about fictional male characters
English nursery rhymes
Year of song unknown
Songwriter unknown
{{Poetry-stub