The history of Auld Lang Syne: A song for the ages

As the clocks strike midnight one by one on New Year’s Eve, one song will ring out more than any other from the world’s thronging crowds—”Auld Lang Syne”, the Scots-language ode to friendship and good times past. 

Most will know that “Auld Lang Syne” was first set to paper by the Scottish poet Robert Burns—though he claimed that he was not its original author, only a documentarian of one fragment of an old oral folk tradition.

He sent the poem to the Scots Musical Museum in 1788 with the note: “The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man."

Whether he really did procure the song from a wizened Scot is up for debate, though it does seem fair to take him at his word—”Auld Lang Syne” is predated by at least one ballad, “Old Long Syne”, written by James Watson in 1711, while Robert Ayton’s poem “Old Long Syne” opens with the familiar phrase, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot.”

Burns’ version quickly became popular in Scotland after it was published in 1799, though it took some time for it to be associated with hogmanay.

According to historian Dr Morag Grant, the concept of “auld lang syne” (which translates to “times long past”) was once a Jacobite tradition.

Poems masquerading as tales about parted lovers disguised laments for an absent king, or spoke to the departure of emigrants from the Highlands (then torched by the clearances) for freer shores in the United States.

The poet Andrew Lang would later pen a neo-Jacobite parody of Burns’ song in the late 1800s, scribing lines like “Shall ancient freedom be forgot/And the auld Stuart line?”.

Thanks to that Scottish diaspora—which carried its folk traditions to places like the States, Canada and New Zealand—snatches of “Auld Lang Syne” are prolific throughout history.

In America, William Lloyd Garrison wrote “The Song of the Abolitionist” to its tune.

In Jamaica, on August 1, 1838, one Mrs Campbell claimed that tens of thousands of liberated slaves sang a freedom song adapted from “Auld Lang Syne”, which opened with the lines “Yes, we are free; our sunny isle,/Has burst the long worn chain.”

During World War One, soldiers sang “We are here because we are here” in the trenches, the bittersweet melody taking on a sardonic tone.

It was in 19th-century England that the New Year’s Eve tradition emerged. In Scotland itself, Dr Grant found more records of crowds singing “A Guid New Year”—though she does note one newspaper article about Glasgow’s Cross steeple, which chimed its bells to Burns’ tune in a not so subtle hint that the gathered revellers should go home to their beds.

But at St Paul’s in London, Scottish expats would gather together and belt out the words to “Auld Lang Syne”. “To miss it in the eyes of some Scots would amount to little less than a crime,” the Edinburgh Evening Courant wrote at the time. 

The Freemasons popularised the tradition of crossing hands as they sang. Burns himself was a committed Freemason, and his masonic friends held the very first Burns’ supper on the fifth anniversary of his death.

Nearly eight decades later, in 1871, a newspaper write-up of the Ayrshire lodge’s Burns’ supper described how the members crossed their arms and held hands in a “circle of unity”—a parting ritual that the song became central to for many fraternal groups. 

An increasingly connected world helped to propel the song’s spread. The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, sang it down the mouthpiece to demonstrate the new telecommunications equipment (500 yards away, a group of workers picked up the muffled song from the bottom of a coal mine).

Later, another scientist called Emile Berliner chose it as one of the first songs to be recorded on the gramophone.

In 1929, the bandleader Guy Lombardo—himself from Ontario, Canada, where a high concentration of Scottish immigrants had settled—began the tradition of playing “Auld Lang Syne” from Times Square, first on radio and then on television, earning him the nickname “Mr New Year’s Eve”.

Today, Burns’ poem has become so notorious across the world that in some places it has almost entirely shed its Scottish roots.

In Soviet Russia, the socialist themes in his work were reappropriated to make him the “people’s poet”, helped in part by Burns’ “Russian father” Samuil Marshak (whose first published translations of the bard included the newly titled “Old Friendship”).

Meanwhile in China, a scene from the wildly popular wartime film Waterloo Bridge popularised the tune, which is now sung widely as “The Friendship Song”. 

From its folkloric beginnings, “Auld Lang Syne” has travelled far, shapeshifting and acquiring new meaning as it passes between people and cultures.

Today, it is the second most sung song in the English language (beaten only by “Happy Birthday”)—quite the feat for a poem written in a Scottish minority language.

Not all who cross their arms this New Year’s Eve will know the words, nor their meaning, but all can still revel in that core celebration of fraternity, tradition and the memories that bind us.