The phrase "Texas Tea" meant marijuana in the early 20th Century jazz circles - BUT it also means petroleum or oil.
Question: Was the phrase "Texas Tea" first associated with petroleum due to the Beverly Hillbillies theme song or did the theme song pick up on a standard usage of the phrase "Texas Tea" from the oil industry.
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was just the word "tea" that was a euphemism for marijuana. I never heard "Texas Tea" used in that context.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea, Kuwaiti cool-aid ...
From what I read online, oil industry usage predates the Beverly Hillbillies by many years. Oil was discovered in Texas in 1901.
I need a verifiable source for the first use of the term "Texas Tea" in reference to oil or petroleum in print or song. Any help with documentation is greatly appreciated.
books.google.com may be a good source. The advanced search function allow searching for a range of dates. Searching before December 1960, I found a reference to the marijuana meaning in 1946 within the first 30 entries.
Within the first 60 entries, "Texas tea" is a lethal mixture for capital punishment (I think) from 1936.
While not looking at the entire list, I did see reference to a "tea kettle" refinery prefaced by Texas which did not seem to name the petroleum, but may have been a consequential pairing of the words.
Happy searching.
Emmett
That "tea kettle refinery" reference leads me to wonder if oil wasn't colloquially called "tea" by those in the business even without the "Texas" qualifier. Was Teapot Dome, before it became the label for a political scandal, originally given that name because it was an oil field, or because someone once thought a geographic feature resembled an actual teapot?