Robert Burns and the Refashioning of Scottish Identity through Song

Abstract

Robert Burns contributed to the collection, compilation, and editing of several song collections, most notably The Scots Musical Museum (1797–1803), although he did not live to see it published. Attribution has proven to be a sticky point of consideration for literary scholars as Burns moved through this conceptual musical museum like a curator: changing, editing, and wholly rewriting sections of song texts to fit his poetic sensibilities. Some tunes were indeed traditional and even Scottish in origin, appearing as they had in earlier collections, while others were almost completely changed, with Burns altering the original text and subverting the traditional message. This, however, had been the traditional art of the ballad maker, and Burns embraced this role, changing both texts and tunes as part of a living, oral tradition. The study focuses on two tunes out of his larger collections, “Greensleeves” and “Ye Jacobites by Name.” “Greensleeves” was a well-known English tune, and “Ye Jacobites by Name” was a ballad that had been used both to attack and justify Scottish resistance to Hanoverian rule. Neither piece would seem to be a particularly promising representation of Scottish culture c. 1800. These pieces, however, highlight an aspect of Burns’s work that not only illuminates his attention to the musicality of these pieces—in an age when most song collections were still printed without notated music—but also his efforts to curate these works, refashioning them to suit a new, proto- Romantic Scottish identity.