AULD LANG SYNE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18397, 15 May 1934, Page 12

AULD LANG SYNE

“SUNG INCORRECTLY” The execulivc of the Burns Federation is to issue a brochure which will tell the world how its greatest song of friendship should be sung. "Auld Lang Syne,” the song that everybody sings, say the federation in the current issue of its Quarterly Bulletin, is the song that nobody knows, for it has never succeeded in establishing its own words correctly. Millions of gatherings have taken up its strains in an overflow of warmheartedness, but most of them have made the welkin ring with garbled lines, phrases that Burns never wrote, variations that neither scholarship nor taste approves. Trusty "frien’s” still supplant trusty "lie res”; “cups o’ kindness” still battle for position with "gude* willy waughts”; and the lovely, lingering last line of verse and chorus —"For auld fang syne”—is still ousted by the breathless scurry of "For the days of auld lang syne.” The Burns Federation hopes that by the publication of the brochure variations of the song will pass out of currency. It will be distributed among Scottish societies all over the world in order that a concerted effort may be made to have the song sung correctly.