Burns and Music
As January draws towards a close, the thoughts of Scots all around the world turn towards January 25th: a night for haggis, tatties and neeps, malt whisky and hearty recitals of 'Ode to a Haggis'! Few Scotsmen are better known – and their work better loved – than Robert Burns.
But the Ayrshire farmer who became one of the forefathers of romantic poetry also left an incredible and less-explored musical legacy. Everyone knows 'Auld Lang Syne' of course, but Burns' lyrical capabilities have influenced many musicians on a more complex and profound level than the annual singing of one of the world's best-known songs.
In the Scotland Burns was born into in 1759 – in Alloway, South Ayrshire, the eldest of seven children – music was a hugely popular folk medium that served several functions: entertainment of course, but music also worked as an oral history lesson, keeping legends alive and passing folklore down through the generations. From an early stage in his career, Burns collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. (For example, Auld Lang Syne is set to the traditional tune, Can Ye Labour Lea; A Red, Red Rose is set to the tune of Major Graham; and The Battle of Sherramuir is set to the Cameronian Rant.)
In Edinburgh, in 1787, Burns was enjoying the first flushes of fame after years of struggle when he met James Johnson, a struggling music engraver and music seller with a love of old Scots songs and a determination to preserve them. It was an interest Burns shared and he became an enthusiastic contributor to Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum. The first volume, published in 1787, included three songs by Burns who would eventually be responsible for about a third of the 600 songs in the whole collection when the final volume was published over a decade later. (1787 was the same year Burns met Walter Scott who later said that Burns' eyes 'literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.')
Burns also collaborated with the musical enthusiast George Thomson in publishing 'classical' arrangements of Scottish folk songs. The first 'set' of A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs was issued in 1793. Burns' interest in the area grew and when he was asked to write lyrics for a compendium to be called The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by contributing an astonishing 100 songs. Burns described his method of composition:
'My way is: I consider the poetic sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression, then choose my theme, begin one stanza, when that is composed – which is generally the most difficult part of the business – I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed.'
Burns began to go on music collecting trips to the Borders and the Highlands and gradually became an advocate of 'ballad simplicity', developing a theory of matching tunes to lyrics in the process. Among the most famous of the 368 songs he wrote or adapted are "Auld Lang Syne," "My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose," "John Anderson My Jo," "My Heart's in the Highlands," and "A Man's a Man for A'That." The celebrated lyric "Scots Wha Hae," set to the tune of an old song, "Hey tutti tatie," is represented as the battle call of King Robert the Bruce, leading the Scottish troops against the English at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Always with an eye on the political and the universal Burns told Thomson he had in mind, not only the mediaeval struggle for freedom, but "some other struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient". Burns was writing, of course, at the time of the French Revolution.
The musical influence of Burns continues to be felt today. Scots singer Eddi Reader had enjoyed a successful pop career with both Fairground Attraction and as a solo artist. However, following the death of her father in the late nineties she found herself more interested in exploring her Scottish musical roots. 'After my father died . . . I fell back in love with that little bit of Scotland. I wanted to do a traditional album that related to the Celtic and Scottish music that I'd heard bits of throughout my life, from leaving school and going to Kilmarnock folk club, through all the folk clubs in Scotland to busking and street singing.'
Eventually Reader was asked to sing with the Scottish National Orchestra who were performing at a Burns festival. 'I maybe had four Burns songs, then I thought well if I had eight I could do a gig, then there were ten. The songs just landed in my lap really, and I got the idea that I could do a record.'
In making the record she came to feel the spirit of Robert Burns strongly around her. 'I got the sense that I was being haunted by the guy, as if he were sitting across from me going ”Great!“ You sang Ae Fond Kiss!' The resulting album, Peacetime, was both a critical and commercial success.
Folk music of the story-telling kind Burns would surely have recognised, continues to thrive in Scotland today and its influence can be heard in the work of artists as diverse as Amy Macdonald, KT Tunstall and Phil Cunningham, or in the music of Martyn Bennett, who died tragically, just three years ago, at the age of 33.
Bennett was very influential in the development of modern Celtic Fusion: a blending of traditional Celtic and modern music. Bennett began playing the Great Highland Bagpipes at the age of 10, and by the time he was 12 he was winning prizes at piping competitions in Scotland. He then took up violin, piano and composing at the age of 15 at the City of Edinburgh Music School, continuing his studies at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 1990. In 1996, he released his first self-titled album on Eclectic Records. In 1998 he released Bothy Culture, his most successful album. His composition, Mackay's Memoirs, was played at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 by the band of Broughton High School. His last album, Grit, was recorded during his struggle with cancer and marks a drastic change in his sound as Bennett became too weak to play his instruments and had to rely entirely on samples and synthesizers in order to keep creating music. He died on January 30, 2005, following a long struggle with cancer.
A more unexpected musical connection with Burns' work is in the rhythms of Jamaican dub reggae, yet this is exactly the link Glasgow artist Graham Fagen has been exploring. In 1786 Burns was planning to emigrate to Jamaica to work on a sugar plantation, so disillusioned was he by that point of his chances of ever finding success in Scotland. But success came and Burns, fortunately, never made that journey. But in December of last year Fagen did, travelling to Savannah La Mar in Jamaica, where Burns would have docked.
Travelling around west Jamaica with Burns' 1792 poem The Slave's Lament in his pocket, Fagen found himself delving into both Scotland's and Jamaica's pasts – and the history of slavery that links them – as he drove through villages called Glasgow, Dundee and Kilmarnock. But the response from the locals was incredible, and very emotional. 'They were all talking about Burns, not knowing anything about him. But they all said that the man who wrote these words was great and that it came from the heart.'
Heart indeed, for the genius of Burns is marked by spontaneity, directness and blazing wit. Qualities which today – more than two centuries after his birth – continue to attract new generations of musicians and artists to the work of Scotland's national bard.
Happy birthday Rabbie!
