Vital Sparks: Auld Lang Syne

It’s nearly New Year’s Eve, and what would New Year’s Eve be without Auld Lang Syne?In standard English, we sing:

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?

(Chorus) For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.

And in Robert Burns’s original Scots version:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?

(Chorus) For auld lang syne, my jo, for auld lang syne,
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet, for auld lang syne.

There is a very good book that will tell you more than you need to know about Auld Lang Syne. It’s by M.J. Grant, and called Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, published by OpenBook Publishers and freely available on their website.

It traces the origins of the words and tunes (yes, tunes) for ALS, and its slightly murky past. The tune to which ALS is usually sung is the second tune proposed by Burns, and its melody is essentially the melody that we know from The Sacred Harp as 162 PLENARY (in both the 2025 edition, and the 2012 Cooper Book edition). This tune was first published, in 1799, in George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice^[1][2].

But the text present in The Sacred Harp comes from an Isaac Watts poem entitled “A funeral thought” from his 1707 Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Book 2, number 68). The 2025 edition and the Cooper book have just the first three verses^[3]:

1 Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound,
My ears attend the cry,
"Ye living men, come view the ground
Where you must shortly lie.”

2 "Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your towers;
The tall, the wise, the reverend head
Must lie as low as ours."

3 Great God, is this our certain doom?
And are we still secure?
Still walking downward to our tomb,
And yet prepare no more?

4 Grant us the powers of quickening grace
To fit our souls to fly,
Then, when we drop this dying flesh,
We'll rise above the sky.

This is a memento mori song, which we discussed in the last issue of Vital Sparks. It reminds us that we all will die, whether we be a prince, or strong, or wise, or holy, or just our own sorrowful selves. “Come view the ground where you must shortly lie:” the grave. Only God’s grace can enliven our dead souls so that, at the moment our bodies drop into the tomb, we might “rise above the sky.”

Makers of The Sacred Harp state that the pairing of this tune and text occurs in the 1839 second edition of Andrew W. Johnson's The American Harmony, arranged by an A.C. Clark, who might have been a relative (by marriage) to William Walker^[4]. In any case, it shows up in Walker’s Southern Harmony and Musical Companion^[5]. No doubt this is how it enters The Sacred Harp; it’s in the first edition, and has been in every edition since.

Why did Clark pair this text with this tune? Auld Lang Syne was well-known on both sides of the Atlantic by the time of his arrangement. Obviously, we can never know for sure, but I think the answer lies in the very popularity of Auld Lang Syne. Although the Burns text was very strongly associated with this tune, the tune itself was used in many ways. Grant’s book details the reception of this tune, both with these words and with various parodies and contrafacta. He lists, for example, seven texts in one book, The Universal Songster, from 1829 and 1834 that suggest they be sung to this air. These range from humorous parodies (“Should brandy ever be forgot for port or cherry wine?”) to serious parody (“Should lovers’ joys be e’er forgot, Or ever out of mind?”) to full-blown contrafacta (“My wife she died three months ago, And left poor I to moan”).

I first encountered the ubiquity of Auld Lang Syne when looking through a Republican songster published for Lincoln’s presidential campaign. I’m not sure exactly which one I first saw, but here is one from 1860:

All hail! ye friends of Liberty,
Ye honest sons of toil;
Come, let us raise a shout to-day
For Freedom and Free Soil.

Lowell Mason even did a version in his Juvenile Songster in 1837. He wrote an arrangement called, Auld Lang Syne at School, with the words starting “Shall school acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind.”

So, I think it was natural for Clark to select this popular tune for arrangement, and to find a fitting text. The association of Auld Lang Syne with New Year’s celebration (or the Scottish analog, Hogmanay) doesn’t reach full strength, at least in the United States, until the 1880s or so, according to Grant. I don’t think this is the specific reason for this text. The 1820 Missouri Harmony set Watts’s text to a minor plain tune called FUNERAL THOUGHT, and the 1867 New Harp of Columbia uses Watts’s text for a minor fuge called NEW DURHAM.

The association of Burns’s text, the tune Auld Lang Syne, and New Year’s celebration is extremely strong these days. This is oddly borne out by looking at the minutes of Sacred Harp singings from 1995-2024. PLENARY is led 1.6 times as often in December, and 2.7 times as often in January, compared to the average number of times it is led per month — similar to other seasonality trends we see for Christmas songs in December, for example^[6]. There’s an old joke, probably lost on the younger generation, that a real classical music lover can listen to Rimsky-Korsakov's “Flight of the Bumblebee” without thinking of the Green Hornet. Perhaps a real Sacred Harp singer is one who can sing the words to PLENARY and think on their own mortality, and not think of Auld Lang Syne.

Bonus material

In looking at various books, I discovered a tune called HYMN FOR THE NEW YEAR in the 1846 The Missouri Harmony, on pages 18-19, and available on Internet Archive.

^[1] I think this antedates Makers of The Sacred Harp’s date for this collection, which refers to an 1802 edition.

^[2] Interesting side note: Ignaz Pleyel, of 143 PLEYEL’S HYMN SECOND, did arrangements for the Select Collection, as did Beethoven.

^[3] There’s a subtle difference between the punctuation of the 2025 edition and the 2012 Cooper book edition. I’ll leave it as a fun exercise to the reader to find it, and which one seems closer to Watts’s intent.

^[4] I haven’t seen a scan of the song in this edition. I’m sure Makers is correct that the song appears there; I’m assuming that it is with the Watts text and is called PLENARY. Warren Steel noted on Fasola Discussions the possible connection between Walker and Clark; Steel quotes J.S. James.

^[5] Walker’s version had only three parts; I assume Clark’s did as well. Minne Floyd supplied an alto part in the 1902 edition of the Cooper book.

^[6] It’s probably worth its own essay at some point, but I calculated such anomalies and present them in Seasonality of songs led from The Sacred Harp, 1995-2024.