"Auld Lang Syne" Is A Hill-Billy Tune

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 136, 30 January 1942, Page 13

"Auld Lang Syne" Is A Hill-Billy Tune

HAT heading will probably cause some lifted eyebrows but it’s nevertheless fairly ‘close to the mark, writes "Rob" in The Listener-In. When Burns wrote the words. of "Auld Lang Syne" one hundred and fifty years ago, he didn’t think much of the tune at all, and wrote to his publisher, "‘ The air is but mediocre, but the song, which has never been in print, until I took it down from an old man singing, is enough to recommend the air." And now for the hill-billy part of the heading. In the early 1700’s Scots songs descended on London in a wave of popularity. "Auld Lang Syne," and a dozen others closely resembling it, cropped up in English stage shows of the period, and were a speciality with the virtuosi on the jew’s harp. From the very earliest times the jew’s harp has been known. From China to Spain it was twanged as an accompaniment to’ harp and fiddle, and it was the standard instrument of Scotland long before the bagpipes were adopted. The troubadours of old England sat in the minstrel’s gallery, scraped on their primitive fiddles and twanged away on their jew’s harps, just as to-day the clothes-horse cowboys whom we call hill-billies sit around and play their fiddles, accordions, guitars, and jew’s harps. The effect must have been much the same: and that’s the reason for the heading.