Abstract
The bulk of Burns’s songs were contributed to two rival publications. The Scots Musical Museum, edited by the Edinburgh engraver James Johnson, and published in six volumes (Edinburgh 1787, 1788, 1790, 1792, 1796, 1803) contains some 200 songs and fragments written, revised or communicated by Burns. A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice, edited by Edinburgh clerk George Thomson and published in eight parts (Edinburgh 1793, 1798, 1799, ?1799, 1802, 1803, 1805, 1818) contains more than 70 songs by Burns; after Burns’s death ‘Thomson meddled and muddled, impudently and sometimes disastrously, with the manuscripts Burns had left in his hands’ (Kinsley, 991).
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© 1991 Alan Bold
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Bold, A. (1991). The Songs. In: A Burns Companion. Literary Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21165-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21165-4_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-21167-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-21165-4
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