Page 529 - The Secret Museum

song has also been played when the Union Jack is lowered when a British colony

becomes independent, and is popular in Russia, where studying Robert Burns’s work
is part of the curriculum in schools. In India, the melody was the inspiration for a
song ‘Purano shei diner kotha’ (‘Memories of the Good Old Days’), by the great
Bengali poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore, who also wrote the Indian national
anthem, ‘Jana Gana Mana’, sung by children across India every morning at school.

There are five other extant versions of’Auld Lang Syne’ written in Burns’s hand.
If you were able to see them all together, you would be able to trace the creative
process at work in the writing of the song, for each version is slightly different. The

Mitchell Library’s version differs from the others in that the lyric generally recorded
as ‘For Auld Lang Syne, my dear’ is, in this instance, ‘For Auld Lang Syne, my jo.’ I
asked the curators of the library whether Robert Burns had had a girlfriend called Jo.
They explained that ‘jo’ was a term of endearment, one that no one really uses in
Scotland any more. ‘My jo’ means something like, ‘my darling’ or ‘my dear’.

Robert Burns said that the song ‘thrills my soul’, but he didn’t actually write it
himself. ‘I took it down from an old man’s singing,’ he wrote in 1793. He sent it to
James Johnson, the editor of The Scots Musical Museum (an anthology of traditional

Scottish songs), saying it was ‘an olden song’ passed between families and friends.

As it turns out, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ had its origins in an anonymous fifteenth century
poem that went under various names, including ‘Auld Kindries Foryett’, ‘Old
Longsyne’ and, finally, in 1724, ‘Auld Lang Syne’. It was also a drinking song during
the Civil War. A song beginning ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot’ appeared in
print before Burns adopted the line: it was written by the poet Allan Ramsay, whose
love of Scottish folk traditions inspired Burns; it’s about two comrades parting after
a battle. What Robert Burns did was to take the sentimental feeling of the poem and

adapt it to an age of emigration. He universalized it, and made it far stronger and
more affecting than ever before. He described what he did as ‘mending’ songs, giving
them to the world for the future.

This version of the song, that lives in storage, doesn’t break out of its vault very
often. It was flown to America for a Tartan Day celebration in New York City and
was on exhibition there for a little while, but most of the time it is stored wrapped in
archival paper, protected by foam, in its black briefcase. Of course, anyone can see
it, because this original belongs to the people of Glasgow, so the curators at the

library will show it to you if you ask to see it. But preserving it out of the light is in
its best interests, helping it to survive long into the future.

What I didn’t know about the song is that Burns wrote the lyrics, but the tune came
later. There were several versions touted around – including one by Beethoven –
before we got the internationally recognized one sung at midnight on New Year’s
Eve. The Mitchell Library owns a copy of Beethoven’s score, which it displays in its
Burns Room, right at the top of the library building. The room contains all Burns’s
works, as well as memorabilia and other interesting treasures associated with this