The Travels of ‘John Anderson, my jo’

Abstract

Far from being a lament or lamentation in any conventional sense of the genre, the song 'John Anderson, my jo' is-certainly in Robert Burns' sanitised version-a homage to enduring love. The words of the female protagonist, however, also betray a palpable sense of shared personal loss (a perspective also common to lament), although what it is that is lost changes between iterations. An earlier, bawdy version focuses on the loss of youth with special attention to the accompanying loss of sexual function, whereas in Burns' poem this has been reduced to lost youth alone. Nonetheless, the underlying theme of loss remains constant. The plaintive and lamenting character of the melody created by its minor mode and slow tempo affectively support the character of loss.In this article I will examine how this underlying sense of lament informs the many political appropriations and parodies that were made of this song, focusing on its travels out to the colonies of settlement. These colonies, when taken together, have become known as the British world, a world constituted by a sense of shared British identity and culture.21 will demonstrate how the sense of loss, together with the affective qualities of the melody, was appropriated and reframed within the arena of radical politics across the nineteenthcentury British world and identify the particular ways political appropriations transformed the poignant sense of loss into one of rebuke and complaint. By tracking various printed forms and performances of this song from Britain to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, this article will reveal a shared culture of political radicalism and popular song. The article will also highlight how in the political parodies of 'John Anderson, my jo', the personal and intimate become the political and public. Moreover, these versions demonstrate how the malleability of popular song provides a means of expressing local inflections within a shared inter-colonial culture. I will also consider the role of songs such as this in the formation of diasporic cultures and music's important part in sustaining the memory of home for the thousands who forsook kith and kin and, either willingly or not, participated in the waves of nineteenth-century emigration from Britain.This research on 'John Anderson, my jo' takes its place as part of a broader project that is inherently interdisciplinary and centres upon the role of music, in particular song and singing practices, in the spread of radical political culture across the British world. As such it throws up questions about the disciplinary forms, methods and objectives of history and musicology. Whereas music has often held a marginal position in historical studies-in great part because of the specialist requirements of musical literacy and musical analysis-history has always been integral to mainstream musicology. Its primary uses, however, have been to cast light upon and bring greater understanding to a particular work of music-to provide a musical work its cultural context. Here, however, the direction is reversed; here music is used to cast light upon, and provide alternative dimensions of, history. My argument is thus twofold: that a tune functions as a vehicle of transmission that can cover vast distances, both temporally and geographically, and that songs themselves are at one and the same time agents and vessels of history, shaping it and containing it.The eighteenth century saw into being on the one hand Enlightenment ideas such as rationalism and empiricism and on the other the rise of literary antiquarianism and the 'eighteenth-century British ballad revival'.3 This was the time of not only the philosophical theorising of John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, but also the antiquarian ballad collecting of individuals such as Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson and James Johnson. Multiple versions and variants of 'John Anderson, my jo' in both textual and musical forms are found in ballad collections from this period. …