Best Burns song: Your chance to vote

ALEX Salmond and the entire tourism industry are hoping that a man born 250 years ago can save Scotland from the credit crisis. Robert Burns would probably have found it all very amusing.

Today, ahead of the Burns Night to end all Burns Nights on 25 January, we offer readers the chance to vote for their favourite song by the Bard. Most of us know but a handful of his works and in this selection, Dr Fred Freeman – producer of the 13-volume series, The Complete Songs of Robert Burns for Linn Records – throws in a few tunes that many will never have heard.

Dr Freeman gives a commentary on 20 songs, from popular favourites such as Auld Lang Syne and A Man's A Man to some of those lesser-known works. Go to swts.oldsite.jpimedia.uk and follow the links to vote – if you're not sure what to choose, listen to each song before making a selection. We will publish the results in the paper at the end of next week, so get your votes in quickly.

AULD LANG SYNE A song about good fellowship, which has enjoyed several incarnations over the centuries. Burns's version, arguably an original composition rather than a collected offering, should be better known with its original air.

A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT Probably Burns's most famous composition of equality and universal brotherhood, the song was, quite appropriately, chosen for the reopening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 (and beautifully sung by Sheena Wellington).

O MY LUVE'S LIKE A RED, RED ROSE A prime example of Burns's notion of "ballad simplicity" with its use of monosyllables and simple repeated rhetorical patterns to make his most direct, and most famous, statement about romantic love.

AE FOND KISS A somewhat sentimental piece, inspired by a rather stilted relationship with Mrs Nancy M'Lehose ('Clarinda'), the love song is redeemed, in great measure, by its haunting melody and memorable fourth verse:

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,

Had we never lov'd sae blindly,

Never met – or never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS One of Sir Walter's Scott's favourites, this song, based upon a nostalgic Irish broadside ballad, enjoyed great popularity on the Continent.

SUCH A PARCEL OF ROGUES IN A NATION An anti-Union song that curses the 31 "rogues" of the Scottish commission who carried through the treaty of 1707.

AH CHLORIS SINCE IT MAY NOT BE A song, written in a neoclassical English idiom, which effectively uses the tune Major Graham, Burns's original melody for O My Luve's Like A Red, Red Rose.

YE BANKS AND BRAES O BONNIE DOON Another song of 'pathos', to use Burns's description, which manages to celebrate the Ayrshire landscape as it contrasts the plight of man and that of nature, the forlorn lover and the courting birds.

LASSIE WI THE LINTWHITE LOCKS This is one of Burns's most striking pastoral love songs, for which he did battle with his editor, George Thomson, over the air to which it is set – a modified version of Rothemurche's Rant – and the subject matter of a beauty possessing "lint-white locks".

SCOTS WHA HAE Burns himself described this as a warm song about "Liberty & Independence", past and present, as he reflected upon both Bannockburn and the French Revolution.

O CAM YE HERE THE FIGHT TO SHUN A prime example of Burns's subtle use of a reel and mouth-music to describe, in breathless monologue, the chaos of Sheriffmuir, one of the Jacobite battles of 1715.

O LAY THY LOOF + ALTHO MY BACK + GUDE ALE Drawing upon the songwriter's extensive instrumental background, this is a delightful medley of songs: the first based upon a Russian march, followed by two good-going reels.

RAVING WINDS A brilliant but wholly unknown love song that should totally serve as a wake-up call for those who keep insisting – through performing the same tired two dozen or so acknowledged Burns songs – that they know the poet's works so intimately.

BROSE AND BUTTER A song of mischievous high jinks and sexual antics, which is beautifully underpinned by the light slip jig (and veritable mouth-music) to which it is set.

THE SOLDIER'S RETURN Set to the lovely popular Borders pipe tune, The Mill, Mill O, the ballad tells the story of a soldier returning home to good fortune, once his former true love manages to recognise who he actually is.

O FOR MY AIN KING Another unknown Burnsian ballad, this time about William Wallace, beautifully set to a rather primitive jig that highlights the medieval context.

BONNIE WEE THING One of Burns's finest love songs, drawing a simple contrast between his delicate appreciation of the lass, Deborah Davies of Tenby, and his unrequited passions.

WHEN ROSY MAY COMES IN WI FLOWERS Set to the lovely Gardiner's March, this is one of Burns's best pastoral songs and, linguistically, with its subtle mix of Scots and English, one of his most sophisticated.

AWA WHIGS AWA A Jacobite song, with its flowing march, that cleverly conveys the feeling of sweeping the Whigs right out of the country.

O MIRK, MIRK IS THIS MIDNIGHT HOUR A haunting setting of a well-known ballad and, as Burns maintained, with more of the ballad simplicity about it in the neatly compressed dramatic monologue.