Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son

"Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son"
Sheet music
Nursery rhyme
Published	1795

"Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" is a popular English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19621.

Modern versions of the rhyme include:

The 'pig' mentioned in the song is almost certainly not a live animal but rather a kind of pastry, often made with an apple filling, smaller than a pie.

Another version of the rhyme is:

This rhyme is often conflated with a separate and longer rhyme:

Both rhymes were first printed separately in a Tom the Piper's Son, a chapbook produced around 1795 in London, England. The origins of the shorter and better known rhyme are unknown.

The second, longer rhyme was an adaptation of an existing verse which was current in England around the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The following verse, known as "The Distracted Jockey's Lamentations", may have been written for (but not included in) Thomas D'Urfey's play The Campaigners (1698):

This verse seems to have been adapted for a recruiting song designed to gain volunteers for the Duke of Marlborough's campaigns about 1705, with the title "The Recruiting Officer; or The Merry Volunteers", better today known as "Over the Hills and Far Away", in which the hero is called Tom.

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