"Auld Lang Syne" Heresy

[thescot]

Where are ye, JockScot? We need you on this one.

Since we'll soon join hands at the Burns Supper--kilted, of course--and sing The Bard's own verse (slightly borrowed according to him) as we close, I thought I'd do a little research.

I ran across this little snippet which might be heresy--or a bit of scholarly truth. I just love researching such minutiae and dropping it at the most appropriate moment to demonstrate my vast storehouse of useless informatino.

"'And we'll tak a right guid willie-waught,' as we have read it fifty times before, and the usual note 'willie-waught, hearty draught'; one editor copying the text from another, like sheep jumping over a hedge.

It takes but a very moderate acquaintance with the Scottish tongue to know that there is no such word as willie-waught, which nobody ever saw except in this line. A waught, or waucht for a draught, is common enough, and so is guid-willie, for hearty, cordial. . . ."

The writer goes on to assign this to a printer's error in misplacing the hyphen in Johnson's Museum, and the rest is perpetuated historical mistake. This is just the kind of thing that I find fascinating (while causing my wife to call me a nerd).

So, anyone else ever heard this? How 'bout it, Jock ole man? Comments?

Todd?

[vmac3205]

Thank you, Jim.
My life is now compleat and I can die a fulfilled and happy woman.

[Tony]

I never get that far through the song, but fwiw.......

a quick google and the majority of the first few pages of hits are for guid-willie waught.

Maks mair sense tae me too.

[Fougasse]

I've just checked the various copies of Burns on my bookshelves and they all have a variation of guid-willie; none have willie-waught.

[Lachlan09]

What can I add ? My willie is full of waught !

[McMurdo]

I saw this on another forum that I'm on It's from the Scotsman on December 30th.

By Jim Gilchrist

EXTRATERRESTRIAL anthropologists, should there be such entities, observing us from very far away, must be particularly exercised around this time of year as they record global outbreaks of a very specific kind of mass hysteria,in which large groups of alcohol-tranced strangers link hands and jerk rhythmically in a kind of crazed seance while mouthing words about"auld acquaintance" – with which, however, many of the singers seem singularly unacquainted.

Yes,tomorrow night the year's end will once again see revellers the world over making linguistic mincemeat of Auld Lang Syne. Seldom can an anthem of international fraternity have been so mangled by so many, but as an Art Works Scotland documentary on BBC Two Scotland will point out tomorrow night, while many know that it was written by our erstwhile Homecoming hero, Robert Burns, few – even in Scotland – know all the words, fewer still know what they mean, and gey few know the song's history, which goes back centuries before it was knocked into the shape we know now by the Lad from Kyle.

The film, made by Skyline Productions, intersperses interviews with Burns scholars and singers,as well as performance extracts from such diverse interpreters as Eddi Reader, the Proclaimers and Moby, with documenting the run-up to an attempt to assemble the largest number of people singing Auld Lang Syne during last year's Edinburgh's Hogmanay festivities.

Actor Libby McCarthur voices her opinion that "Burns was a genius. He knew what touched people in their hearts and their minds and their souls",while musician and composer Phil Cunningham, who has played in more than his fair share of TV Hogmanay shows, comments: "You can see it in the faces and smiles – and the tears – of people as they sing it."Roddy Woomble, Idle wild singer and more recently folk-cross over adventurer, regards the song as something lodged in his subconscious since childhood.

Meanwhile, academic Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, suggests that while the very phrase "auld lang syne" may be incomprehensible to many of those who attempt to sing it at this time of year, it is not a term which renders easily into English. "Old long since," to make a rigidly literal translation, sounds nonsensical, but "auld lang syne" has a ring to it and a very specific meaning in Scots, redolent of times gone by and fond nostalgia.

As Riach says: "There are no abstractions. Everything is precise, vivid, and that's a keynote of Burns's writing. "

Not that Burns came up with a brand new number. Noted as much for his song collecting and his ability to develop older fragments as for his poetry, Burns was inspired by the song's numerous antecedents. As he wrote to his friend, Mrs Dunlop, in 1788: "Apropos, is not the Scots phrase, 'Auld lang syne,' exceedingly expressive? There is an old song& tune which has often thrilled thro' my soul. You know I am an enthusiast in old Scots songs … Light be the turf on the breast of theheaven-inspired Poet who composed this glorious Fragment! There is moreof the fire of native genius in it, than in half a dozen of modern English Bacchanalians."

As tomorrow's documentary explains,songs in the style of Auld Lang Syne go back as far as the mid-16thcentury. The National Library of Scotland's Nat Edwards reveals an anonymous ballad printed in the Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568 titled Auld Kyndnes Foryett, while a 1701 broadside declares: "Assure thyself of welcome Love,/For Old lang sine ..."

Allan Ramsay published what Edwards describes as "a rather wet" version in 1720, but it wasn't until 1788 that Burns, allegedly sitting on the Banks of the Nith,penned his own version, uniquely fusing homely sentiments with a more robust, convivial and fraternal sensibility. He said that three of the verses were old, the other two by himself.

Fast forward to the21st century and, while Burns's pithy Scots remains generallyaccessible, for some reason, the term "a richt guid willie-waught"appears to cause global perplexity, second only, perhaps, to that other famous Burnsian puzzler, "a damen icker in a thrave" from To A Mouse.Yet the aforesaid willie-waucht is simply a good drink. As commentators point out, it is the moment when the gentler-sounding "cup of kindness"which figures earlier in the song becomes the kind of quaffing that seals a more masculine bond of friendship (and, OK, that "damen ickerin a thrave," according to my battered Burns edition, is an odd ear in24 sheaves – a "thrave" – of corn).

Then there are those –including many who you'd think would know better – who bludgeon the title by substituting a "z" for the "s" in "syne", lending the Bard's guid braid Scots a faintly engaging, if utterly inappropriate, Dorset burr – Burns hijacked by Thomas Hardy.

As Thomas Crawford wrote in his important critical examination, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs: "In Auld Lang Syne, Burns brings together two different types of nostalgia for past shared happiness, and makes of them a single, compound emotion. Thus our feelings develop as we sing it, until by the end of the song we seem to experience a distillation of all the mutual loyalty, all the partnerships between individuals that have existed since the world began."

It is these sentiments which have made Burns's concoction so enduring and internationally popular. The programme features a Japanese song, with singularly unBurnsian lyrics about "Light of the firely/And the snow beside the window", set to the familiar tune, while the Scots domiciled Bengali poet Bashabi Fraser sings an Indian version. And Alan Riachre calls on the programme how his father, a mariner, was once asked for the words of Auld Lang Syne by a Communist Chinese sea captain.

Then there is the matter of the tune to which it is most widely sung not being Burns's original choice. As the documentary points out, George Thompson, who first published the song three years after Burns's death,not only altered some of the lyrics but set it to a similarly metred but more up-beat-sounding melody in the pentatonic scale, compared with the more delicate tune Burns favoured.

The original, with its winsome rise and fall, has been increasingly sung in recent years by folk artists – the first usage of it I can recall was Jean Redpath singing it back in the 1980s as part of her collaboration with the late Serge Hovey, the extraordinary American composer and arranger who set Burns's vast song canon to sometimes idiosyncratic "contemporary classical" arrangements.

What the Art Works documentary doesn't mention, oddly enough, is that the strains of that original tune of Auld Lang Syne played an unexpected part in a Hollywood box-office hit two years ago, when the movie version of the Sex and the City TV series featured the entire song during a key sequence. It was sung by the Edinburgh-based folk duo The Cast, aka singer and fiddler Mairi Campbell and guitarist Dave Francis, (the film's scorers added discreet strings), having been taken from their debut album, The Winnowing, made back in 1993.

Auld Lang Syne has had a long-running significance for the couple. Its appearance in Sex and the City almost certainly stems back to a 1999 Kennedy Centre Honours concert in Washington, for which the then unknown pair were wheeched across the Atlantic to sing it to Sir Sean Connery. Involved in producing that show was Matthew Broderick, later to marry Sarah Jessica Parker, who,Campbell and Francis reckoned, was probably in the audience. When Parker went on to act in and produce the Sex and the City movie, the song resurfaced, rather to the Edinburgh duo's astonishment.

While it didn't quite elevate the pair into the ranks of A, B or C-list celebrity, it has been helpful, says Campbell. "On the other hand(celebrity] is not really what we choose to do. We were playing again for dancing the following week," she adds.

It may not be the tune millions will be hollering tomorrow night, but, she agrees, the original melody has an appeal of its own. "On an emotional level, it takes you to a different place. It has tiny musical phrases that totally shift its feeling. Then when you read the text, that tune just works beautifully with it. It's a little gem".
• ArtWorks Scotland: Auld Lang Syne is on BBC2 Scotland tomorrow night at 6:25p

Sir Robert Ayton, 1711

THERE are records of folk songs bearing similarities to Auld Lang Syne circulating as early as the 16th century, and Burns wasn't the only poet to try incorporating them into his own work:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never thought upon,
The flames of love extinguished,
And freely past and gone?
Is thy kind heart now grown so cold
In that loving breast of thine,
That thou canst never once reflect
On old-long-syne?



Allan Ramsay, 1720

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Tho' they return with scars?
These are the noble hero's lot,
Obtain'd in glorious wars:
Welcome, my Varo, to my breast,
Thy arms about me twine.
And make me once again as blest,
As I was lang syne



Robert Burns, 1788

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/feat...uld.5944519.jp

[macwilkin]

I can't say I'd ever heard of that "heresy" before, another one that frequently catches folks off-guard is that the tune we know is NOT the original tune to Auld Lang Syne -- this is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86_tlA9maA0

And of course, the last word of the title is pronounced "sign", not "zyne".

T.

[Jock Scot]

thescot.


Oh dear, you really have put me on the spot here! Haggis and Robert Burns are acquired tastes and I have to report that I have singularly failed to acquire the taste of either. So I am most certainly not the chap to ask! Sorry.

[thescot]

thescot.


Oh dear, you really have put me on the spot here! Haggis and Robert Burns are acquired tastes and I have to report that I have singularly failed to acquire the taste of either. So I am most certainly not the chap to ask! Sorry.

I may have to slit my wrists. I am crestfallen. Singularly disappointed and dismayed. Somehow, the world just isn't as bright as it was before, nor will it ever be again.

I confess that I acquired a taste for Burns only after I became an English teacher. Studying the poetry--more than just the usuals of "Mouse" and "Louse" and "My Luve... ' caused me to really admire his work and, dare I say it? (Dare, dare), genius. Then I began to read about his life and work and masonic affiliation, and, well, there you are. As for the haggis, it was love at first bite.

I guess I was thinking that it was the linguistic part of the article that I was hoping you might comment on. That "guid-willie" and "willy-waught" thing.

As to the versions, I copped the words for our program from a site that did have the willy-waught version and just didn't check to see if it was different anywhere else. It is, as mentioned. Apparently the article I stumbled onto was pretty old, 1897 in fact by Wm. Hand Browne, and copyrighted by the Johns Hopkins University Press. It was an article in the journal, Modern Language Notes, vol. vii, no 2. ("You can look it up." Yogi Berra) In fact, you can look it up here: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2919364

I'll put up a copy of the program and photos after the evening, of course. And I shall insist that we sing "guid willie-waught" and not "guid-willie waught." Bwahahahahahahaha.

[macwilkin]

Though I'm very much a fan of Burn's poems, I second your dislike for Haggis. It was a food for the poor, who couldn't afford anything better - like chitterlings in the American South. While it may have fed many a hungry family in times of woe and want, sheep's liver mixed with oatmeal, onions and a few seasonings, boiled in a stomach, really isn't my idea of a savory dish. BTW - the Cajuns in Louisanna have a very similar dish called boudain - it is made with liver, rice, green onions and some seasonings, stuffed into natural sausage casing (made from intestines). Oddly enough, many Cajuns in Louisanna bear Scottish surnames, rather than French ones as one might expect.

It's not so odd, as there are 3 ways to become a Cajun -- by the blood, the ring & the back door. My wife's family's surname, for example, was believed to originally Scottish -- Melanc(s)on -- which is claimed as a sept of the Macmillans. (other evidence points to a Yorkshire origin).

There are two types of boudin, btw -- boudin blanc and boudin rouge, the former being very similar to Haggis. And in a further twist, the French Foreign Legion's march is "Le Boudin":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyoLv_HVFJE

Here you are, some blood pudding, some blood pudding, some blood pudding For the Alsatians, the Swiss, and the Lorrains, For the Belgians, there's none left, They're lazy shirkers

Belgians were forbidden at one time from joining La Legion.

T.