Auld Lang Syne

Robert Burns sent the words to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in 1788 and said he had taken them down from an old man's singing, an old song that had never been in print. Scholars have long suspected he wrote a good deal of it himself. The title is Scots for old long since, the days gone by, and the song is a toast to old friends.

The tune everyone sings came later. Burns thought the one the old song went to was mediocre, and the first time the words appeared with the melody used now was in 1799, in George Thomson's Select Songs of Scotland. It is a pentatonic Scots tune, five notes to the scale, and probably began as a lively dance, possibly the strathspey called The Miller's Wedding. William Shield slipped a few bars of it into the overture to his opera Rosina in 1782, so it was in the air before Burns's words met it.

Scots sang it at Hogmanay, the last night of the year, and emigrants carried it everywhere. In America it belongs to Guy Lombardo, whose band played it at midnight on New Year's Eve from 1929 on, on radio and then television. Most people sing only the first verse and the chorus, which is what this page writes out.

On a mandolin in G the tune sits in first position, from the open D course to the g on the E course. The verse and the chorus end on the same four bars, so there are really only twelve to learn. The dotted rhythm carries the tune, a long note and a short one on most first beats, so count it slowly before playing it at the speed a room sings it.