There is something deeply sad - or at least wistful - about Auld Lang Syne; Burns's version presupposes the separation of old lovers or bosom friends and an unbridgeable distance between them - except for memory and that cup of kindness.
- Simon Schama
The song always struck me as Scottish melancholy as high art.
The song originated as a poem, but it probably wasn’t written by Robert Burns as is commonly believed - at least not entirely.
Scholars have dated versions as far back as the 16th century, to a song called Auld Kyndnes Foryett. Burns himself would have known several versions that were popular in print and performance throughout the 18th century. His song is much closer to these versions than the 16th-century original. One of these, by the poet Allan Ramsay, is set against a backdrop of war and talks of the parting of lovers. Burns typically opens this out and makes it more universal.
When he sent his version of Auld Lang Syne to his great friend Frances Dunlop in 1788, he told her he’d heard an old man singing it. There’s no evidence of who this man might have been – and Burns may even have fabricated the story to show how close he was to popular culture.
The most charitable thing one can say is that the great poet was simply the first person to write down an old Scottish folk song (it bears more than a passing resemblance to “Old Long Syne,” a ballad that was printed by James Watson in 1711).
Burns devoted the last ten years of his short life to collecting old verses, revising and "mending" as he saw fit, even composing poetry to accompany popular airs. Burns himself said, “I took it down from an old man,” and whether it was transcribed or co-authored, it’s safe to say that the “Auld Lang Syne” we know today is some combination of an old poem and Burns’s creative input.
In any case, Burns sent a copy of the poem to Dunlop in 1788 and wrote: "There is more of the fire of native genius in it than in half a dozen of modern English Bacchanalians!" Later he contributed it to the Scots Musical Museum.
Five years later, Burns wrote to James Johnson, who was assembling a book of old Scottish songs: "The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man." It was clear Burns was sticking to his story.
What is less well known is that the melody was not the one he intended. The one that became famous was first attached to the song in the late 1790s and Burns, who died in 1796, knew nothing about it.
The man who published the soon-to-be-famous song was an Edinburgh song editor, George Thomson. Burns had told him a few years earlier that a melody was usually his starting point for writing a song. Yet his inspiration in 1788 when he wrote Auld Lang Syne, which translates roughly as Old Time’s Sake, was actually not a melody but an existing song with the same opening line – “Should auld acquaintance be forgot”.
When Auld Lang Syne was first published in the Scots Musical Museum collection in 1796, it was joined to a rather slow and haunting tune. This melody really brings out an element of sadness in the text.
Burns told George Thomson in 1793 that he didn’t think much of the tune commonly sung to existing versions of the song. In a 23 page letter to Thomson Burns told him that he considered it "mediocre," and Thomson apparently agreed: when he finally published Auld Lang Syne in his Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs in 1799, he substituted a different tune - the one we sing today.
Thomson needed no more encouragement to switch to the melody that we know today. Much more celebratory in feel, it had appeared in some earlier 18th-century fiddle collections and was often referred to as The Miller’s Wedding or The Miller’s Daughter.
By the time Thomson had made the decision to marry the tune to Burns' text, the poet had died in 1796 and there was no chance of asking his opinion on the matter. But certainly Burns would have known it, since he wrote another song called O Can Ye Labour Lea (1792) for a variant of the same tune.
Thomson characteristically forged ahead and sent the tune to Vienna, where the Bohemian composer Leopold Koželuch set it for voice, piano, violin and cello. Auld Lang Syne then appeared in Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs in 1799, set to the famous tune for the first time. From then on, it gathered popular momentum across the British isles and beyond through social gatherings and in many theatrical productions.
Why the song became world famous is still something of a mystery, though all that socialising and theatre-going in the 19th century must have helped. Burns had died in considerable debt and it really is too bad that performing rights were a thing of the future but the song help secure his own cultural immortality.
