“Auld Lang Syne” is a Scottish song, traditionally sung in the English-speaking world to see out the old year at midnight on Hogmanay or New Year’s Eve. Robert Burns sent it to James Johnson for the Scots Musical Museum in 1788 with a note calling it an old song that he had taken down from an old man. How much of the words are his has long been debated, and it is generally agreed that he did not write the first verse, the only one most people know. A song called “Old Long Syne,” with the same opening line, had been printed in James Watson’s Scots Poems in 1711.
The melody sung today is not the one those early printings carried. The scholar Fuld, cited in the Fiddler’s Companion, finds motifs of it in Playford’s “The Duke of Buccleugh’s Tune” of 1687, in “The Miller’s Wedding” in Bremner’s Scots Reels of about 1765, and in the overture to William Shield’s opera Rosina of 1783. Burns also wrote a different song, “O Can Ye Labor Lea, Young Man,” to a tune that is substantially the one we know. The words and this melody were first printed together in 1799 in George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, although it is not clear whether Thomson or Burns put them together. The tune is pentatonic.
It has been played as a dance tune as well as sung. John MacAlpin of Killin arranged a strathspey version for dancing, and Beethoven made a setting of the song early in the nineteenth century.
