Burns and Music Hall

Abstract

Music hall’s emergence in mid-nineteenth century Scotland brought enormous change in urban entertainments, as older pre-industrial traditions faced an influx of new cosmopolitan styles. This chapter explores how Burns was performed in the new urban contexts of Scottish music hall and its successor, variety theatre. These contexts included 1860s free-and-easies and singing saloons where Burns songs and recitations offered both continuity with older Scottish song traditions and subjects for parodies and satirical updating; his championing by Scotch comics and concert singers of the 1880s, like James Houston and WF Frame, who maintained working-class engagement with Burns through performances at temperance and trades union soirees; popular concerts, rural tours, illustrated lantern shows and comic sketches; Burns tribute songs; Burns songs in Rob Roy; and the promotion, from the 1890s, of Burns’s diasporic appeal by Scottish comedians performing to Canadian and US expatriate audiences. The chapter argues that, while music hall played a significant part in mediating and shaping the changing place of Burns in popular culture, by Scottish variety’s twentieth-century heyday Burns was elided into a constructed ‘national’ performance, predicated on tartan, Highland music and dance where, paradoxically, the lowland Burns emerged as the central bardic voice.