[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-"
>
> 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 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.
>
> --Cynthia Cathcart
> Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To
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James Dick in 'The Songs of Robert Burns', p. 434, quotes the letter to
Thomson as above, and dates it as September, 1793.
Bruce Olson
--
Old English, Irish and, Scots: popular songs, tunes, broadside
ballads at my website (no advs-spam, etc)- www.erols.com/olsonw
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