All About Auld Lang Syne
The New Year's song
All the best for a musical, meaningful, and peaceful 2025!
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Tonight is New Year’s Eve, and whether your night is wild and exciting or quiet and comfortable, chances are pretty good that you will hear or sing the most popular song of the night, “Auld Lang Syne.”
Did you know that the melody usually used for this song was not the original? If you'd like to hear the song as intended by the songwriter/poet Robert Burns when he created it over 200 years ago, listen to the beautiful version sung in the first three videos at the end of this article. The first is by The Cast, the duo of Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis. This performance was used as the soundtrack for a New Year’s montage in the movie Sex and the City. (Read about them in this post from my publication about Scottish music, culture and landscapes.) The second video is a brief one featuring Jean Redpath singing the melody (she always preferred this melody to the usual one) and telling a little story about how one audience member took offense at this version of the song (and took action!). The third video is a beautiful rendition sung and arranged by the Barra MacNeils of Cape Breton.
The song was already old in Robert Burns’s day. He collected it for a book of Scottish songs, and added his own words to it, resulting in the song we now know. But his editor, George Thomson, chose a different melody for it than the one Burns wanted, and it was the editor’s choice that was published in Thomson’s A Select Collection of Scottish Airs in 1799, three years after Burns died. It may have been a popular tune at the time, but Burns regarded it as "mediocre." Nevertheless, this is the melody we are so familiar with today. The fourth and last video below features the usual version sung beautifully by Dougie Maclean, along with the Scots words and an English translation.
There has been speculation on where Thomson may have found his melody. Many say it was composed by William Shield, a popular English composer and friend of Handel's. Some suggest it was written for his opera Rosina, which was performed in 1782 on New Year's Eve, in London. However, there doesn’t appear to be a melody in that opera that resembles “Auld Lang Syne.”
Others have suggested that Shield was quoting an older Scottish melody called "Miller's Wedding" (which actually sounds more like the Burns song “Comin’ Thru the Rye”), or one called "Lasses of the Ferry" (which sounds like an old strathspey, but not much like “Auld Lang Syne”).
But Shield did write a strathspey that approximates the popular melody for “Auld Lang Syne.” It’s called "Sir Alexander Don's Strathspey,” and is likely to have been the source, though it wasn’t in his opera Rosina. You can see the sheet music for this strathspey below.
Whatever the history, the tradition of singing “Auld Lang Syne” at New Year's is honored round the world, and a melody honored by so many people for so long carries a greater meaning now than when it was new. So while we can enjoy the beauty of the melody Burns selected, it's hard not to appreciate a group of friends singing the song as we know it, locking arms and welcoming the new year.
Below, you’ll find the sheet music for the popular melody for “Auld Lang Syne,” plus the original tune that Burns liked, followed by music for the strathspey Thomson may have drawn upon, and the four video/recordings mentioned above. Enjoy!
Here’s to a New Year of good music, good health, peace, and hope.
