Annotation:Cotillon (4)

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COTILLON [4] (Youth's the Season). AKA - "Toney's Rant," "Zoney's Rant." English, Air (cut time). London publisher John Young printed a simplified version of the tune and country dance directions ("Longways for as many as will") in The Third Volume of the Dancing Master [1], 2nd edition (1726, p. 102), under the title "Toney's Rant." The melody was the vehicle for a song by Macheath in John Gay's hugely successful Beggar's Opera (1729, Air XXII) beginning "Youth's the season made for joys:"

Youth’s the season made for joys,
Love is then our duty;
She alone who that employs,
Well deserves her beauty.
Let’s be gay,
While we may,
Beauty’s a flower despis’d in decay.

Let us drink and sport to-day,
Ours is not tomorrow.
Love with youth flies swift away,
Age is nought but sorrow.
Dance and sing,
Time’s on the wing,
Life never knows the return of spring.

Gay's character prefaces the song by saying: "Ere you seat yourselves, ladies, what think you of a dance! (Enter Harper.) Play the French tune that Mrs. Slammekin was so fond of (a dance a-la-mode in the French manner); near the end of it this song and chorus." From this, and from the character of the tune, Frank Kidson (Minstrelsy of England, 1901) identifies the it as a having been derived from a French cotillion, a form in vogue at the time of the Beggar's Opera. Entered as "Cottillion" [sic] as the main title and "Youth's the season" as the alternate title, the piece appears in the music manuscript copybook collection of London musician Thomas Hammersley (c. 1790).

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Raven (English Country Dance Tunes), 1984; p. 57.

Recorded sources: Park Records, Maddy Prior & the Carnival Band - " Hang Up Sorrow And Care" (2009, as "Youth's the Season").

See also listing at:
Hear versions of Gay's song on youtube.com [2] [3]