The Traditional Sources of Four Burns Songs: ‘The Posie’, ‘Craigie-burn Wood’, ‘Ae Day a braw wooer’ and ‘A waukrife Minnie’

Abstract

Robert Burns devoted much effort to the collection of tunes which he expected to be published in James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson’s Select Collection. The tunes were often accompanied by the words of songs and Burns related to these sources in different ways. This article studies in detail his relationship to four songs and demonstrates how the partial information that he gives explicitly can be developed to give an impression of these source songs as wholes, so increasing our knowledge of traditional Scottish song in the eighteenth century. The study also throws light on Burns’s method of composition when he was using a traditional base.