Robert Burns: Something Auld

• Picture: Complimentary

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, Idlewild singer and more recently folk-crossover 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 the heaven-inspired Poet who composed this glorious Fragment! There is more of 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-16th century. 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 the 21st century and, while Burns's pithy Scots remains generally accessible, 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 icker in a thrave," according to my battered Burns edition, is an odd ear in 24 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 Riach recalls 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 ArtWorks 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 6:25pm

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