#670 Why do we sing Auld Lang Syne at New Years?

Why do we sing Auld Lang Syne at New Years? Because Scottish people emigrated all over the world, taking the song with them, and then a Canadian bandleader started playing it every year on American national TV.

Auld Lang Syne means “old long since”. For auld lang syne is often translated as “for the sake of old times”. It is a poem about two friends who have met up after a presumably long time. The song starts by asking if it is ok to forget old acquaintances and never think about them. It then goes on to say that, of course, it isn’t ok and the song is about two friends catching up over a drink.

The lyrics of the song are credited to the Scottish poet Robert Burns, but he himself said that he didn’t write them. He submitted the song to a friend of his, Frances Dunlop, at the Scots Musical Museum in 1788 and he wrote that he had heard an old man singing the song and took down the lyrics. He undoubtedly added or changed some of the lyrics, but he didn’t come up with the whole song. In fact, there are older versions of a song called Auld Lang Syne. There is one by a poet called James Watson in 1711. This has a similar chorus, but it is about an unfaithful lover. There is another song with the title Auld Lang Syne that was around in the early 1600s. The song may have been around for a long time before Robert Burns wrote it down. Many people think that Burns wrote the whole song and merely said that he heard it. That is something we can never know.

The original song also had a very different tune to the one we sing today. Here is a link to a version of it on YouTube. It is very different, but still a good tune. Robert Burns wasn’t overly fond of it. He called it “but mediocre”. In 1793, George Thomson, a song editor living in Edinburgh, was editing an anthology of Scottish music. He included Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne, but he agreed that the music didn’t work, so he replaced it with the tune that we sing today. The tune Thomson took came in part from a Scottish fiddle song called The Miller’s Wedding. He changed it a little and he sent the tune to a composer in Vienna called Leopold Kozeluch, who set it properly to music. The finished result was published in George Thomson’s Select Songs of Scotland in 1799 and is the song we sing every New Year’s Eve.

So, why do we sing it at New Year’s? A while after George Thomson published the new version of Auld Lang Syne, Scottish people started to sing it at Hogmanay. Hogmanay is the last day of the year, and it celebrates the coming year. The tradition could be Viking, it could be French, but whatever it is, people started to sing Auld Lang Syne. By the mid-1800s, it was the most common song sung at New Year. The tradition also moved into England as well. Things might have stopped there if it hadn’t been for potato blight and the Industrial Revolution.

During the early to mid-1800s, Scotland was affected by the same potato blight that caused the famines in Ireland. The famines killed millions of people. Being completely dependent on the potato crop, and not having any support from England, large numbers of Scots did the same as the Irish and emigrated to America and Canada. This number was increased because the Industrial Revolution had industrialized Scotland, but it had introduced a very poor working class. These people, if they could, also emigrated to America and Scotland. When they went, they took their traditions with them. One of them was Halloween, and another was the singing of Auld Lang Syne at New Years.

Again, things could have stopped there, if it hadn’t been for a Canadian bandleader called Guy Lombardo. He had grown up in Ontario, Canada, which was an area with a lot of Scottish people and naturally sang Auld Lang Syne at New Years. In 1929, he and his Royal Canadian Band, performed in a New Year’s Eve radio show from New York. At the end of the show, they played Auld Lang Syne. Over the years they moved from radio to TV and Mr. Lombardo did this every year until 1977. Auld Lang Syne became an American tradition. It appeared in a few American movies, and this reinforced the tradition in other countries as well. And that is why we still sing Auld Lang Syne at New Years. And this is what I learned today.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-doing-a-wine-toast-6405781/

Sources

https://www.glasgowworld.com/lifestyle/auld-lang-syne-lyrics-history-and-meaning-of-the-robert-burns-song-and-why-we-sing-it-on-new-years-eve-3511447

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auld_Lang_Syne

https://proofed.com/writing-tips/hogmanay-auld-lang-syne/

https://time.com/5061965/auld-lang-syne-new-years-eve-history/

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/why-is-auld-lang-syne-sung-on-new-year-eve-and-what-does-it-mean/articleshow/96604315.cms

https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/23222063.sing-auld-lang-syne-new-years-eve-zoe-neal-weald/