on 15/12/2000 2:26 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I was at the Library of Congress yesterday searching for song histories. I
> found a book of reproductions of autograph manuscripts. Just letters,
> inscriptions, notes, things like that, from people like the Venerable Bede,
> John Locke, Geoffrey Chaucer, and so on. The contents were completely off my
> research path, but it was so interesting a book that I stopped to take a look
> through it.
>
> In one of those incredible circumstances where the resource comes to the
> researcher, I found in this book a letter of Robert Burns'. And the letter
> was about Auld Lang Syne! Just days before he died, Burns wrote to George
> Thomson, who was in the process of editing his book of "Scotish Airs", the
> following:
>
> "One Song more, & I have done. - Auld lang syne - The air is but mediocre;
> but the following song, the old Song of the olden times, & which has never
> been in print, not even in manuscript, untill I took it down from an old
> man's Singing; is enough to recommend any air-"
I believe this is or was the page which is displayed open - presumably in
facsimile - and legible in one of the museums. Can't remember whether this
is at Burns's birthplace near the coast, or in an exhibit at Gretna. And it
might have been a long time ago.
>
> And then he goes on to write out the poem. It's very difficult to read and I
> haven't transcribed it yet, though I intend to, and then compare it to what's
> in the SMM. (Lucky the Library lets you xerox stuff.)
There's no real need, unless you doubt the standard volumes. I have lost my
grandfather's monster leatherbound Burns to one my brothers, but I got a
decent set of 1820s 'works' which includes all the letters, commonplace
books, notes and every scrap - they were obsessed with the man in those
days. Cost £8.60 for four volumes, some of the music missing, very common as
people used to tear it out to put on the piano.
This set - Allan Cunningham's edition, Thomas Jack Publishers of Edinburgh -
has all this letter - all the letters to Thomson and those in reply -
printed in full with annotations, and the lyrics as Burns sent them. I
bought it earlier this year because no-one has removed the engravings and
there's a good two dozen excellent copperplates in it!
>
> There was some commentary to the letter, which clung to the belief that Burns
> wrote the song and was just too modest to admit it. I think that's a long
> shot: it seems to me that the simplest explanation is most often the correct
> one: Burns was telling the truth, and indeed took it down from an old man's
> singing.
>
Burns's own comments on his verse are highly disparaging. If he really liked
something, he might pretend it was not his, or belittle it himself. You
should read what he said about 'A Man's a Man for a'That' - "The
following...consequently is no song; but will be allowed, I think, to be two
or three pretty good prose thoughts, inverted into rhyme". Followed by the
verses, and then, to Thomson:
"I do not give you the foregoing song for your book, but merely by way of
vive la bagatelle; for the piece is not really poetry. How will the
following do for 'Craigie-Burn Wood':
(and then he's off into another carefully reworded song).
But he was dealing with the man whose friends thought 'Hey Tuttie Taitie'
(sic) 'a tune totally devoid of interest and grandeur' and who wanted the
air called 'Lewie Gordon' to be used for Scots Wha Hae... accompanied by an
extension of the last line of each verse to fit the tune...
David
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